Amazing facts about whales

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

On July 3, our planet celebrates World Whale and Dolphin Day. This holiday was established in 1986 when the International Whaling Commission (IWC), after 200 years of merciless extermination, introduced a ban on whaling.

I want to talk about whales only in a superlative degree. These multi-ton giants are peaceful and playful. Some of them live up to 200 years, but it is still not clear why the whales die. They are almost immortal.

Whales and immortality

Whales are long-lived. Some of them, like the bowhead whale, live up to 200 years. All their life they develop, reproduce, grow, and at a more mature age they do this with no less intensity than in their "youth".

Researching whales can help medicine solve the problem of aging, since even the oldest individuals show no signs of aging when studied. Whales, like some other animals (such as, for example, mole rats) do not grow decrepit. Scientists still cannot give an unambiguous answer to what they die from.

The age of whales can be determined by the protein content in the lens of the eye, which is formed in these mammals at birth. Lens clouding is by far the only indicator of lens aging. Scientist Vladimir Skulachev, who has been dealing with aging issues for many years, believes that it is possible that whales go blind, and then they simply break.

Whales are listening

Whales have rather weak eyesight, and also have no sense of smell at all, so the whales perceive the world around them mainly by ear. They have a very good one. Interestingly, whales do not have external ears, they perceive sounds with the lower jaw, from which the resonance spreads to the inner and middle ears. Whales communicate with each other at a distance using sounds. It has been established that whales are capable of making the loudest sounds of all creatures living on Earth; other individuals can hear whale "conversations" at a distance of more than 15,000 kilometers.

Amazingly, whales love music. Last year, two American artists plunged into the ocean in an underwater vehicle with classical music included. The whales showed great interest in this "concert".

And yet, in captivity, whales can learn to imitate human speech, which they imitate by dramatically increasing the pressure in their nasal cavities and making their sound lips vibrate.

Sperm whales sleep while standing

It is difficult to call whales "sleepyheads", they may not sleep for up to three months, but they sleep very little and for a short time, they do it near the surface of the water. The whales stop their movements and sink slowly. Despite their mass, due to the high content of fat in the body, the weight of whales is slightly more than the specific gravity of water, so they sink slowly.

Sperm whales sleep most interestingly - standing. This was discovered recently. A group of scientists off the coast of Chile found a flock of sperm whales that swam upright. Approaching the giants, scientists even dared to touch them, but the sperm whales did not wake up. Sperm whales sleep from 6 pm to midnight, an average of 12 minutes per cycle before surfacing and air entrapment.

Trap mouths

The paper, published in 2012 in the journal Nature, was a study by a group of scientists who were studying minke whales. Scientists managed to find the previously unknown sense organ of a whale. It is a sac-shaped clot of muscles and blood vessels in the center of the mandible. Interestingly, the separation of the lower jaw occurred in whales as early as 30 million years ago.

The discovered organ, according to scientists, serves as a tool for coordinating the movement of the two halves of the jaw during the feeding process. This organ helps to make the movement of the mouth abrupt and synchronized during the attack.

Minke whales hunt krill, capturing them along with the water. The whales then filter the water through the whalebone. The whole cycle takes no more than a couple of minutes. Amazingly, the mass of water that whales capture with one opening of their mouths can be a quarter greater than the mass of the animal itself.

The best of the best

Whales are the largest animals on the planet. The numbers alone are amazing. They may not eat for eight months, but in the summer, during the "lunch" period, they eat almost without a break, eating up to three tons of food a day, the amount of calories they absorb, on average, equals a million.

Whales are constantly on the move; they cross vast distances in the ocean, practically without straying off course. According to research by scientists, the deviation from a straight line in migrating sperm whales does not exceed 1 degree. How whales manage to achieve such accuracy has not yet been clarified (in the course of the version about the sense of the magnetic field, and about the orientation in the sky).

The whales weigh up to 150 tons. The mass of an average whale equals the mass of about 2,700 people, the mass of a whale's heart is 500-700 kilograms, and 8,000 liters of blood circulate daily through the vessels, the diameter of which reaches 30 centimeters.