It just seems logically, bigger animals would eat bigger preys to meet their high energy/caloric needs. So why do whales, the largest animal in the world, eat such small animals (zooplankton)? Such a weird contrast. What is the biological reason for this?
In: Biology
Lots of the largest land animals are herbivores, though, so it doesn’t necessarily follow that animals higher in the food chain would always be the bigger ones. If you’re a predator, you need to be bigger than your prey (or at least big enough to fight it and not die) but you also need to be faster than your prey, which costs more energy the bigger you get.
If you’re an herbivore (or in the ocean, a filter feeder) you don’t really need to be fast to eat since your food is very slow. So either you need to invest in speed to outrun your predators, or sheer size, so your predators will have a hard time killing you.
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