Costa Rica News: Baby Blue Whale Caught on Film

Baby Whale Costa Rica

A baby blue whale filmed off Costa Rica is thought to have been the youngest ever captured on camera, according to a National Geographic documentary to air Sunday.

The baby is believed to be the first proof that a blue whale hot spot in the Pacific Ocean is a birthing ground for the endangered species.

During a January 2008 expedition to the "Dome" - a warm-water region that draws blue whales from hundreds of miles away - the researchers had begun to lose hope of finding a calf. Then two telltale spouts began erupting at the sea surface.

"Oh, tell me that one of them is a small blow, please," Bruce Mate, of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University, says in the documentary.

One of the spouts did turn out to be that of a calf, which approached the research boat—surprising the scientists, given blue whale mothers' protective reputations.

A photographer and videographer dived in and soon had the visual evidence needed to identify the whale as a baby blue, perhaps only weeks old.

Averaging 25 feet (7.6 meters) long at birth, blue whale babies nurse for about seven months until they double in size. Gaining about 200 pounds (90 kilograms) a day, they are the biggest babies ever known to have roamed the Earth.

Blue whales were heavily hunted until a worldwide ban in 1966. Today they are listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, meaning they face a very high risk of extinction in the wild.

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