Gazelle : The Palestinian Biological Bulletin (ISSN 0178 – 6288) . Number 128, August 2015, pp. 1-18. | Page 8

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tinge on the underparts from diatom films on the skin. Other common names for
the blue whale have included Sibbald's rorqual (after Sibbald, who first
described the species), the great blue whale and the great northern rorqual.
These names have now fallen into disuse. The first known usage of the term blue
whale was in Melville's ―Moby-Dick‖, which only mentions it in passing and
does not specifically attribute it to the species in question. The name was really
derived from the Norwegian blåhval, coined by Svend Foyn shortly after he had
perfected the harpoon gun; the Norwegian scientist G. O. Sars adopted it as the
Norwegian common name in 1874 (Wikipedia).
Authorities classify the species into three or four subspecies: B. m. musculus, the
northern blue whale consisting of the North Atlantic and North Pacific
populations, B. m. intermedia, the southern blue whale of the Southern Ocean, B.
m. brevicauda, the pygmy blue whale found in the Indian Ocean and South
Pacific, and the more problematic B. m. indica, the great Indian rorqual, which is
also found in the Indian Ocean and, although described earlier, may be the same
subspecies as B. m. brevicauda (Wikipedia).

The Skeleton of the 24-meters Blue Whale (Balaenoptera musculus) which stranded on
the Kazma (Kadmah) coast in Kuwait in 1963 and is displayed at the Educational Sci