Humpback Whale Migration

Got Milk? Exploring Milk Consumption

Dear Parents,

Our class is thirsty for knowledge! We are studying humpback whales and recently decided to compare our milk consumption with the daily milk consumption of a baby humpback whale calf.

Did you know--

every day a mother humpback whale must produce between 100 and 130 gallons of rich, caloric milk for her calf
she must do this each day throughout the first eight to twelve months of her calf's life
nourished with this nutritional diet, the calf grows up to a foot per month in its first year
the mother's milk is the primary source of food for the calf

We were amazed by this quantity of milk.

Our class did some calculations about our milk consumption. First, we estimated how much milk our whole class drinks in a day, then we estimated how much our families drink in a day. Now we are wondering if we were right. We want to see how long it will take us to drink the amount of milk a humpback calf drinks in just one day!

We would like to start collecting of milk jugs until we have 130 of them!

Please help us by sending clean plastic milk jugs with us to school. Stop in later and find out what we learned!

Thanks!