I remember watching a documentary once and learned that whales need to eat tonnes (literally) of krill per day to survive. I don’t understand why this is better than eating small amounts of large fishes instead.
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Small creatures are easier to grow in mass quantities and are more resilient to any one thing hurting their population. Any environment that’s shared by predator and prey has countless prey animals for every single predator. A grassy field will have fifty breeding pairs of mice for every single owl that hunts them. Food animals eat constantly and breed constantly and can feed themselves within days. Predators eat single meals and raise small families until their babies can hunt on their own.
A one-ton whale will take a year to raise a calf to breeding age and have it bear an offspring. If that whale gets attacked by a shark or a Japanese ~~whaling~~ “science” boat, that ton of whale meat stops reproducing and disappears. But one ton of krill will produce trillions and trillions of eggs in a year and scatter them all over the ocean, millions of which will grow up for a few days and start making eggs of their own before they get eaten.
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