The blue whale is the largest animal known to have ever existed, surpassing even the largest dinosaurs, and its immense size is a result of evolutionary adaptations, particularly the development of baleen for efficient feeding, allowing it to thrive in the ocean where gravity's effects are minimized.
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When we think of the
biggest creatures
that have ever lived,
our minds might wander
to the dinosaurs of yore:
Diplodocus, with its neck
reaching up into the sky.
Tyrannosaurus rex,
that enormous
and terrible lizard king
and the longest of them all,
Patagotitan,
which was about the size of
four school busses
parked end to end.
But what if I was to tell you
that the largest known animal
to ever exist lives among us?
They are here and now,
swimming around the depths
of our vast oceans.
This is the blue whale.
Hi, I’m Danielle Dufault
and you’re watching Animalogic.
Today we're talking about the mammal
with the most, the blue whale.
The blue whale is not
just the largest mammal on Earth.
It's very likely
the largest animal to ever exist.
Ever.
No dinos or sea
creatures from the past can compare.
At least not that we know of.
And if there were,
we probably
would have found fossils by now.
So how big are these blue cuties?
Let's try our best
to fully comprehend
just how big a blue whale can be.
is an incredibly long animal.
The largest examples of blue
whales are over 30m long.
That's 20 average
sized humans living end to end.
Next time you're at
your family reunion recruit
your parents, your grandparents,
your weird uncle, your kooky aunt,
and your two favorite cousins
to lay in a line.
Then you simply have to ask
ten more members
of your extended family
to lay down too.
Only now can you truly appreciate
how long a blue whale is?
But their length isn't
even the most impressive thing
about blue whales
when it comes to their sheer size.
One of the largest ever found
weighed over 190,000kg.
Sticking with the family
reunion metaphor.
That's the equivalent
of all the family
you just asked to lay on the ground.
Plus another 2480 people.
To put that into perspective.
That's the weight of you,
your parents,
your four grandparents,
your eight great grandparents,
your 16 great great grandparents,
your 32 great great
great grandparents,
your 64 great great
great great grandparents.
You're 128
great great
great great grandparents.
You're 256.
Great great great great
great great grandparents.
Your 512.
Great great great great great
great great grandparents.
And you are 1024 great great
great great grandparents.
That's like every direct
relative you've had
since the year 1700
plus another 450 people.
This blue human group would equal
just a single blue whale.
The scale of these creatures
is really quite dizzying.
The flippers, for example,
are around three meters
long or about the length of an SUV.
Well, this is certainly enormous.
The blue whales
flippers are considered small
because they only represent
about 12% of their body length.
The longest flippers, relative
to body
length in cetaceans,
goes to the humpback whale,
which sports flippers
that are a third of
their overall body length.
While we're on flippers,
did you know that
flippers are essentially
just modified hands?
If you were to x-ray a flipper,
you would see the distinctive bones
that make up these appendages.
But let's keep going with our body
scan of the big blue.
The eyes of the blue
whale are about the size
of a mini soccer ball.
Compare that to our eyeballs,
which are slightly smaller
than a golf ball.
Although the blue whale
is the biggest creature on Earth,
it doesn't have the
biggest eyeballs either.
That honor goes to the giant squid,
which has peepers
the size of a basketball.
They need those humongous eyes
in order to see in
extremely low light
conditions of the deep sea.
But the blue whale makes do
with a relatively smaller eye,
forging closer to the surface
and singing songs
to communicate with each other.
It would be incredible
to see them in person.
And who knows,
maybe one day we will.
My favorite thing about doing
this show is that it
takes us
to wild places in search of animals.
From looking for the largest land
predator on earth, the polar bear,
to one of the smallest,
the water bear.
We get into nature
in search of the perfect shot,
and when you're in nature for days,
being comfortable is a must.
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And now,
back to the
larger than life blue whale.
There is so much lore
surrounding the size of blue whales,
including that you could park
a Volkswagen Beetle
in a blue whales
heart and swim through its arteries.
Let's examine that whale of a tail.
Well, not the size of a compact car.
The heart of the blue
whale is still about 180kg,
and a meter and a half tall.
That's about the size of 640
human hearts.
While their arteries are large,
they definitely aren't
big enough to swim through.
You could definitely send
a volleyball
through one of them
with room to spare, though.
Or if you are, say,
an Olympic gymnast,
you might be able to squeeze
through the largest arteries
just as expected
from an animal of their size.
These huge
mammals are also capable
of producing
the loudest sounds of any animal.
They are as loud as a jet engine.
Blue whales
don't have vocal cords like we do.
Instead, their U-shaped voicebox
presses up
against a specialized cushion of fat
and muscle
to produce
these extremely loud sounds
that can be heard up to
thousands of kilometers away.
Some of the sounds they
produce, called infrasonic sounds,
are so low
that we humans
aren't even capable of hearing them.
But if we were close enough,
we would certainly feel
the vibrations in our bellies.
With anatomy this large,
you'd think that
everything on a blue
whale would be enormous.
But one part is actually
surprisingly small.
I am, of course,
talking about it's throat.
The throat of a blue
whale is actually only 10
to 20cm wide.
To compare,
a human throat
is about two centimeters wide,
meaning that it's not even ten times
larger than a human's,
despite the entire animal itself
being 2500 times heavier.
The reason their throat is so small
is simple.
It's because these whales
have adapted to eat very small prey.
Blue whales are what are called
baleen whales,
meaning that they have
baleen plates,
mustached looking structures
made of the same substance
that our hair is made of.
But filters out the tiny krill
that they eat.
It seems unlikely
that the largest animal
would eat one of the smallest,
but when there's a krill,
there's a whale.
To feed
the blue whale will charge
that a group of krill
opening its massive jaws,
the pleats
on the underside of its lower
jaw allow it to take in up to 70
tons of water
and krill in a single mouthful.
The whale will then press its tongue
upwards to the roof of its mouth,
forcing the water out
with their baleen plates,
keeping the krill in.
The only thing left to do
is swallow the krill,
which presents no problem
because the 1 to 2 centimeter krill
go right down
that 10 to 20 centimeter hatch.
It's kind of like
when kids at the pool spit
water through their teeth.
Only in their case,
they're keeping millions
of prey animals in
their cavernous mouths.
It takes a
lot of krill
to power a body of that size.
With blue whales
eating upwards of 14,500kg,
and daily
looks like
eating the equivalent
weight of three elephants
every single day.
Considering that blue whales
are estimated
to live 80 to 90 years,
that's like eating close
to 100,000 elephants
worth of krill in a lifetime.
But with around 700 trillion
Antarctic krill
weighing about 400 million tons
swimming around
at any
given time
in the Southern Ocean alone,
at least we know
their food is in good supply
for now, at least.
For comparison.
that’s about how much
all the humans on Earth weigh, too.
Keeping krill in good supply
is, as you can imagine,
K-rill-tical.
We talked to our friend Diane, who's
been studying blue whales
in the Gulf of California
for over 30 years, to learn more.
The whales are very good gardener
of their own ecosystem.
So the whale feed down,
below the photic zone
where the phytoplankton is.
And then it defecate at surface.
And we also did experiments
with the feces looking at,
you know in
three different big bottle in
at sea,
close to where the whales are
without just the normal water
with the phytoplankton
there, same water
with a little bit of feces
and the same water
with double of feces
and the productivity
after the first bottle, after
a couple of days went down,
there was not enough nutrient.
The phytoplankton just went down
in the second bottle.
It went up after 2 to 3 days
and the other one went way up.
So what happened
is that in the feces,
there's a lot of nutrients.
They spend
one month
and a half in the same place.
They're not going and coming
and they stay there.
And so if they stay there
a month and a half, two months,
maybe what they do by feeding
and defecating in the hands
so they can continue to feed.
In other words,
whales eat krill in deep water,
then they poop out the surface.
Bacteria turn the feces into food
for microscopic plants,
and their numbers explode.
The plants feed krill,
and they also multiply.
And then the whale eats the krill.
So the whales actively
make the surface more productive
by bringing nutrients
from the bottom of the
ocean to the surface.
But eventually it's time to move on.
So where did these whales go?
To find out,
we asked our friend
Doctor John Ryan, who listens
to blue whale songs
to track their numbers.
Blue whales.
They just simply
have to search farther
and wider to find the krill.
We can hear when they migrate.
So we can.
They change depth
because they change how they sing,
so we can hear
when they're migrating,
and therefore we can listen
and know how that migration
changes from year to year.
And they're we've
that's where we learned
that blue whales
will change
the timing
of their migration
by up to a third of the year,
which is the full
length of the migration period
sometimes.
And that's
because they have to adapt.
They have to always take advantage
of when an ecosystem
allows them
to pack on energy stores.
So if there's food,
they'll stick around.
But if not, they'll go
look for it elsewhere.
It sounds simple at first,
until you start
wondering how the heck whales find
krill in the vastness of the ocean.
In a in an environment where,
the physical features
defined by different water
masses can be very small scale,
the whales are
finding them persistently
and consistently with precision,
that is just mind blowing.
And what's important about that
is that
that's the only way
they can survive.
If they can't navigate
a complex environment
that's changing continuously
and find those dense krill swarms,
they won't persist as a species
because they need to consume
so much food every day
just to sustain that massive body.
So the precision of a giant
has blown my mind.
Another problem Blue Whales face
is that, like everyone,
they have
some very annoying relatives.
Another day it was that whale
that was accompanied
by Tursiops, bottlenose dolphin.
And at the beginning we found out.
That's cool,
because then the dolphin,
when they follow the whales,
they come at the surface
before the whale.
So you can it's easy
to follow the whale let’s say so,
especially if it's traveling.
And that whale was
kind of traveling.
It was not making circle or anything.
These dolphin
were it was a group of maybe 25.
They follow that
whale the whole day.
The whale was so upset.
You have no idea. She.
She really tried.
It was a male, actually.
He really tried to get away,
but there was no point.
I mean, they were always on
on the on their head.
On his head.
I felt that nobody has ever
reported that maybe will make.
But, you know, like the frigate bird
that followed gulls or other birds.
So they regurgitate
and they steal very good fish
they had.
I had the feeling
that these dolphins
wanted that
whale to regurgitate, it’s crazy.
Who knew dolphins
were that into krill tartare?
And the worst part is
that blue whales evolved
from toothed whales
similar to dolphins.
We know this from the fossil record,
but what is harder to determine
is just
when these baleen
structures started evolving.
Unlike
teeth, which are made of bone,
baleen are more akin to hair
or fingernails,
meaning that they don't
fossilize as well,
regardless of when it occurred.
It's the evolution of the baleen
that seems to be the key
to becoming so massive.
According to a recent paper,
researchers used advanced trackers
attached to the whales,
analyzing over 10,000 feeding events
of both toothed and baleen whales.
They discovered
that the cap for size
for toothed
whales
is about the size of a sperm whale.
Because of the trade off
between calories,
it takes to hunt down the calories
gained from eating the krill,
baleen whales, like blue
whales on the flip
side, can take in as much as 10
million calories
in a single enormous gulp,
meaning that they can expand
a lot less energy
to intake nutrition, thereby
allowing them to grow
to such epic proportions.
But becoming
so humongous
is actually pretty recent
for whales,
at least in evolutionary terms,
happening in the last
few million years.
And it all seems to be linked
to the ice ages
as nutrients
run off in times of melt, prey
for baleen
whales became super abundant.
It's the same reason
these whales
today still travel long distances
to their summer
feeding grounds in polar climates.
And it's these oscillations
in food availability
caused by the ice ages
that are likely limiting them
from becoming even larger.
Getting that large for a whale
is kind of cheating,
anyway.
Let me explain.
Animals that live
exclusively in water have an easier
time of existing as behemoths,
since their every movement
an ounce of mass doesn't
need to fight against gravity.
Whales in general lack
the skeletal and muscular structure
to hold their shape
outside of water.
This is part of the reason
why beached
whales are doomed to die,
in addition to dehydration
and overheating.
Just like a human lost
in the desert,
stranded whales will suffer
what are called crush injuries.
Crush injuries are just
what they sound like.
Injuries
sustained by a massive
cetaceans, organs
being crushed
internally
by its own weight on land.
Even if humans managed to intervene
and get the whale
back into the water,
they can die a few hours later
anyway
as a result of these crush injuries.
That's because
being back in the water
with the pressure off
it releases toxic products
from their crushed organs
into the whale's body.
All that to say,
it is only because they grow
and evolve
in an environment
in which gravity has little effect.
Are they free to balloon to sizes?
That would be difficult
or even impossible
to reach or maintain on land.
So when we think all the way back
to the biggest dinosaurs
that ever lived,
like Patagotitan,
it actually makes the enormous
feat of growing
so enormous on land
even more impressive.
It stands to reason that if
you're the biggest around,
your babies are going to be
the biggest,
around too.
blue whale newborns win the award
for chunky babies on Earth.
Once out of the womb,
like all mammals,
they rely on mama's
milk to stay chubby.
Blue whale
babies will drink around
200 litres of their mama's
extra fatty milk per day,
while human milk is around 4% fat.
The milk of the blue
whale is about 50% fat.
To help the babies
bulk up and gain 200 pounds a day.
The thick, fatty consistency here
is key for underwater feeding.
Since blue whale babies don't suckle
like other mammals.
Instead, the momma whale releases
milk in a stream
that the baby can drink without also
chugging too much seawater.
Some of the research we've been most
excited to learn about
is whale tagging,
which is basically a GoPro
with extra sensors
and a GPS tracker.
Thanks to the work of groups
like Cascadia Research,
we get to know where they go,
what they do,
who they hang out with,
and how long they stay out at night.
We're finally getting to see life.
From a whale's point of view,
that data
will help us understand them better
and protect them more efficiently.
We're also getting better
at slowing down for whales.
There are amazing initiatives
like blue whales, blue Skies
that work
with shipping companies
to move at a speed, save for whales,
to give them time
to dive out of the way.
Vessel strikes
and entanglement
in commercial
fishing nets are a big problem.
But pollution, habitat degradation,
climate change and even ocean
noise can severely,
negatively impact
these wonders of nature.
Thankfully, organizations like
Blue Whales, Blue Skies, Cascadia
Research, Diane and her team,
NOAA fisheries,
the International
Whaling Commission,
the World Wildlife Federation,
Whale and Dolphin Conservation,
Save the Whales,
the Blue Whale Project
and the Pacific Whale Foundation,
and many others are stepping in
to protect these whales
and their habitats.
If we act now,
we can save these amazing creatures
from becoming
just more gigantic bones
in our museums.
But for now,
if you can support conservation
organizations, sustainable
eco tourism
and tell everyone
about how lucky we are
to live at the same time
as the literally greatest animal to
ever exist.
So what should we talk about next?
Please let me know in the comments
and don't forget to subscribe
for new episodes every week.
Thanks for watching and see you!
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