I understand, generally, *how* they got that big but not *why*. What was the evolutionary advantage to their massive size? Is there one? Or are they just big for the sake of being big?
In: Biology
Counterintuitively, a large part of it is that their food is so small.
It takes a *lot* of plankton to meet metabolic needs, so a larger collection area (eg. mouth with baleen) is useful, but this means a larger body size, which means a greater food requirement, which means a larger food collection system, and repeat until you run up agains the limits of biology.
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