KOMPAS.com – Animals come in all shapes and sizes, from the smallest beetle to the largest whale.
With so much variety, which of the millions of animal species on earth has the largest head? Also, which species has the largest head relative to body size?
Animal with the biggest head
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) is the largest animal that has ever existed. The largest blue whale (female) can grow up to 34 meters in length, from snout to tail.
Reporting from Live Science, with a length of 5.5 m, the blue whale skull, which is less than a quarter of its body, is the support for the head of the largest animal on Earth.
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Scientists think that the blue whale and other whale species, such as the bowhead whale (Baena mysticetus), whose skull can be up to 5m in size, evolved with large heads and mouths so that they could eat as much as they could in one gulp.
Blue whales, bowheads and other baleen whales consume prey by “lunge-feeding”, that is, by lunging forward with their mouths open and swallowing as much of the prey and water as they can.
The whale then pushes seawater out of its mouth by means of a feather-like baleen, which catches krill and other prey.
The size of the animal’s head compared to its body
It is even more difficult to tell which animal has the largest head in relation to body size.
The animal world is vast and there may be millions of species yet to be discovered by scientists. In addition, there are animals such as octopuses, such as the dumbo octopus (Grimpoteuthis), whose bodies are not clearly structured, making it difficult to identify the “head”.
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Octopuses have a head-like structure called a mantle, plus eight squiggly arms. However, an octopus’ mantle holds all of their organs, plus a brain (and each arm has its own nerve cells that give the arm a kind of mind).
From the outside, the mantle looks like a head, but since it houses not only the brain but also other organs, can it be considered the head?
Then, the insect world may have an answer as to which species has the largest head relative to body size.
Bruno de Medeiros, assistant curator of pollinating insects at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, names some insects that may have the largest heads.
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De Medeiros says insects with “big, bulky heads full of jaw muscles”, such as army termites or leaf cutter ants, whose heads are about half the size of their bodies.
Then there are insects with “very broad heads,” says de Medeiros, such as stalk-eyed flies in the family Diopsidae.
However, perhaps the foremost in the insect world is the female South American cycad beetle (Antliarhinus zamiae).
The beetle takes its name from the plant it pollinated, the cycad, which has thrived since the time of the dinosaurs and looks like a short, fat palm tree.
The cycad beetle has a snout that is twice as long as its body. “Snout” in this case is a layman’s term for the protruding structure of the insect’s head.
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While the body of a beetle (without head) is generally 1 cm, the snout of a cycad beetle can stretch up to 2 cm.
The snout houses the beetle’s eyes and antennae and carries the mandibles (parts of its mouth) at the very end.
There may be other animals out there that have larger heads relative to their body sizes, but for now, it’s the cycads that top the list.
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2023-09-03 14:00:00
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