Data from: Scaling of maneuvering performance in baleen whales: larger whales outperform expectations

Despite their enormous size, whales make their living as voracious
predators. To catch their much smaller, more maneuverable prey, they have
developed several unique locomotor strategies that require high energetic
input, high mechanical power output, and a surprising degree of agility.
To better understand how body size affects maneuverability at the largest
scale, we used bio-logging data, aerial photogrammetry, and a
high-throughput approach to quantify the maneuvering performance of seven
species of free-swimming baleen whales. We found that as body size
increases, absolute maneuvering performance decreases: larger whales use
lower accelerations and perform slower pitch-changes, rolls, and turns
than smaller species. We also found that baleen whales exhibit positive
allometry of maneuvering performance: relative to their body size, larger
whales use higher accelerations, and perform faster pitch-changes, rolls
and certain types of turns than smaller species. However, not all
maneuvers were impacted by body size in the same way, and we found that
larger whales behaviorally adjust for their decreased agility by using
turns that they can perform more effectively. The positive allometry of
maneuvering performance suggests that large whales have compensated for
their increased body size by evolving more effective control surfaces and
by preferentially selecting maneuvers that play to their strengths.