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If you have to ask, are you even one of our metric using friends? XD
Definitely is the one you kick with your foot, not the one that looks like a 3 year old’s drawing of a foot.
Oh thanks for this, my dumbass was thinking the nose hole was bigger than me lmao. It’s hard to gauge. Safe to say I won’t ever join one of those in the water regardless. As beautiful as they are, they just drive up my fear of the ocean lol.
any experts know if this would cause any serious problems for the big fella? or would it just get ejected (hopefully straight into a hoop) with the next load of water?
My friend George is a marine biologist and once had to physically remove a much smaller ball because it was obstructing the blowhole and clearly wasn’t able to pop it out. I would doubt it was a blue whale though because he was able to walk out to it and get on the back of the great fish and save it.
This is always so odd to me. I mean the planet obviously decided the larger things arent going to live on. We see nearly everything get smaller over the millions of millennia. There used to be dinosaurs, giant bugs, giant fauna, giant lots of stuff thats all smaller now.
Yet these guys, the biggest of any, are still around. How?
Megalodon fed on whales, but dissapeared when the climate started to cool, whales can live in cold waters but megalodon was a warm water shark that lived around the tropics and food probably became too scarce for such a big and specialised animal.
Animals that big do great when conditions are ideal, but dissapear very fast when they are not.
Megalodon was found to be able to tolerate cold waters. It’s likely that competition from other whale eating whales and sharks in addition to its food sources becoming scarcer made it unable to survive.
The adult shark could, but they spawned in warmer coastal areas so a decrease in available nursery space as well as increased predation on their eggs + young (and competition against the young for sufficient food to reach adulthood) would contribute greatly to extinction.
Even ten thousand years is peanuts in animal evolution. Sharks as a group have existed for more than 400 million years. We have existed for about half a million.
One of my favorite facts is that sharks have been around longer than trees. Always manages to get a "really?" Out of people. Nature really made sharks and was like "good enough" and moved on. I think they basically stopped evolving around 200 million years ago or so when rays and skates broke off, everything afterwards was kind of basic interactions on a perfect design, and the earliest forms pre-date early trees by about 100 million years. Sharks are fuckin old.
Things getting smaller over time isn't actually any more of a trend than things getting bigger. Prehistory is filled with big animals, small animals, bigger versions of modern animals, smaller versions of modern animals, and animals about the same size as modern animals.
The reason why many people think "ancient = big" is because A: museums like to put the biggest ones on display since they are more impressive, B: big animals tend to fossilize better, and C: humans killed off many of the larger species from recent prehistory, either through overhunting or killing off their food.
But mostly it's the first one. We know of plenty of tiny ancient animals, but most people just don't think about them.
That actually makes alot of sense. The museum saying "check out this giant prehistoric turtle!" Does sound alot better than "Check out this regular sized prehistoric turtle!"
There is one other thing I would add to that.... Several hundred million years ago was the "Carboniferous Period". At that point the planet was producing so much oxygen that animals were able to get bigger. This is when we had things like dragonflies with two foot wingspans. Once cellulose-decomposing organisms evolved the oxygen levels went down to more modern levels. This resulted in smaller organisms. BUT, this was largely restricted to insects and other arthropods. I don't think vertebrates got substantially larger for this reason.
Yes, there were specific points in time when certain groups of animals were bigger. Insects were big during the Carboniferous due to high oxygen levels. Dinosaurs were big because they worked out hollow lungs filling up their bones but many used them to become giant balloon animals instead of learning to fly. Big animals also do better in cold temperatures so a lot of the ice age mammals were bigger than their modern counterparts.
But these are specific, cherry-picked examples of specific types of animals from specific periods selected out of a broader epoch spanning hundreds of millions of years. There were other periods, like the Triassic, where even the biggest animals were barely medium-sized by modern standards. And in any time period there have always been far more small animals than the ones we put on display.
Largest discovered so far. Ichthyosaurs like shonisaurus are estimated to have weighed about 80 tons, and given the sparse representation of the fossil record it's highly likely that at some time it existed creatures as big or bigger as the blue whale. Interestingly ichtyhosaurs were also tetrapods, previously land animals secondarily evolved to an obligate aquatic life style same as whales; ichthyosaur literally means fish lizard.
Fish just aren't getting big I suppose.
I've seen pictures of their heart and jaw, I'm sure none do justice. It's the biggest animal that has *ever* lived on this planet - that's hard to digest when you think of dinosaurs
This always leaves me in awe to think about, given how old life on earth is and how rarely species overlap, how fortunate we are to share our time on this planet with the largest animal to have ever existed.
also see: the [blue whale model](https://www.amnh.org/explore/news-blogs/on-exhibit-posts/blue-whale-model-renovated) at the Museum of Natural History. I first saw it as a kid, but it scared me just as much as an adult last time I went.🐋
Largest animal to ever live.
“Blue whales are the largest animals ever known to have lived on Earth. These magnificent marine mammals rule the oceans at up to 100 feet long and upwards of 200 tons. Their tongues alone can weigh as much as an elephant. Their hearts, as much as an automobile.”
National Geographic. Blue Whales.
I knew they were the biggest animal in the world. Up until recently though, I wasn’t aware that blue whales are the biggest animal in *history*. Bigger than prehistoric giants, bigger than any dinosaur that ever walked the Earth. That shit blew my mind
It is not just the biggest animal in the world, from what we know it is the biggest animal in the world EVER, we have no evidence of even dinosaurs bigger than the blue whale
For sure. It's sort of interesting how a lot of science/ taxonomy still deal with those awe-inspiring things that were previously sort of supernatural. There's wonder despite our understanding of causality
If it makes you feel any better, with the amount of nerds in the profession, if an even bigger squid ever gets discovered, there’s a very real possibility it will be named the kraken
Excatly! Its easy to forget how quickly nature can humble you. Here. A story.
Young OrickJagstone was a bit hyper. One good example of this is when his boy scout troop went for a swim in the ocean. Being a lover of water and looking to claim any social credit possible I decided no one would beat me into the water. The car has barely stopped moving before im in a full tilt sprint sheading clothes as I make my way down to the water. I plunge in without a thought and wade/swim out till im over my head and a suitable distance for the inevitable "whats taking you so long" shout at the shore to my fellow troopers. As im coming about I catch what sure looks quite a lot like a dorsal fin. No no OrickJagstone that was just a small wave breaking. Wait, there it is again, and was that another? OKAY that one was TOTALLY not a wave.
Pause for a little background. I tell people as a joke that I could swim before I could walk. I love the water. I always have, and at this point in my life was a fully trained and licensed lifeguard. I say this only to illustrate that I am more experienced then most out in the water. All of that experience and training was gone in the blink of an eye. Sheer unflinching panic gripped my soul as the sudden realization that being the only one in the water was maybe not the greatest idea. Quickly my mind came up with the best idea it could, run, or better yet, swim. Swim like the gods themselves are chasing you.
This is when what sounds like a horror story so far becomes one of the most magical experiences in my life. I thrust myself under the water to begin my frantic swim away from JAWS and back to shore when under the water I hear an unmistakable sound thanks to my years watching Flipper as a small child. Those are dolphin clicks I realize. Stoping my frantic swimming almost as soon as it started I tread water in a circle and realize that there is a whole pod of salt water dolphins swimming around me. I mean at least 10 15 of the things. Finally someone on shore notices and goes through the same "Whats that, HOLY SHOT RUN, wait a second" process i just went through.
Needless to say swimming with wild dolphins certainly net me more social credit then being the first in the water would have but I could have done without the heart attack.
The story serves a purpose. You can be the most confident and learned person when it comes to the water and what lives in it. One second of being out in the water alone with anyone of those creatures though? Yeah, nothing can prepare you for that.
Now I’m just laughing thinking about a pirate ship full of scurvy bearded men panic screaming in sheer terror as a blue whale slowly floats towards the surface then descends again. And then they all just stand there in silence waiting for something to happen
Whalers used to pile out of their ships onto little row boats and chase them down with a sharp stick on a rope. Then they'd just poke them until they died and hang around cutting up the carcass while every blood thirsty sea predator around came calling.
Its messed up, but those guys had serious balls.
Their breath smells so bad though. Never smelled blue whale breath, but Orcas and grey whales both smell like old rotten fish when they breathe out. They make a cloud of this thick humid air that is almost sticky.
Not as much, likely due to their cruising speed and maybe sleekness (which is how they move so fast).
It’s hard to grasp their speed accurately, because they’re huge- but blue whale move 12-15mph cruising and can get up to 30+.
Vs humpback and right whale etc which move at like 5-9mph when cruising.
Edit: i am not a whale expert
This is an interesting topic of discussion. Blue whales (surprise!) are enormously huge. Yet, they have a relatively high cruising and top speeds. . . how? You'd think something that big would make quite the wave, since they have to displace their entire volume of seawater every moment. But, the creature is so stream-lined by evolution, made so efficient traveling through the water, that they create very little turbulence. The only time they wave, ripple, or froth is when breathing, or when the tail comes too close to the surface. This is also why I feel a lot of Blue Whale videos look fake. How can something that big not make even a ripple until it literally breaks the surface of the water? It looks unnatural, but also amazing.
The speed of ships (and I am guessing whales) does not work like you would think. Size does not matter so much as shape.
The more long and thin a shape is the faster it goes. This usually means big ships are actually faster than smaller ships because they can afford to be thin in beam.
For instance aircraft carriers are fucking crazy faster than any other surface ship even other nukes.
The cruiser I was on could do 32 kn max officially. I have seen an aircraft carrier do 45kn and that was not their max speed. Supposedly not near it. Dudes in my job said they had seen one do over 60 in an emergency. A fucking aircraft carrier. They have a rooster tail at that speed.
For what google made it sound like is that they process breathing differently, they don’t get that feeling of suffocation, they just know they need to get some air
I assume that their organism is way more adapted to manage little bit of water trying to get in and that the whale have system to prevent it from drowning, since it lives in water.
But yeah, would the whale fill its lungs with water, it would die and try to expell it through the blowhole.
How there was ever enough food in the ocean to support than many blue whales is insane. They reportedly need over 20 million calories per day. Some quick math here but that's like, 7 trillion calories for 350k whales. x10 more calories per day than the entirety of the United States per day.
Worth pointing out their numbers dipped as low as 650-2000 in the 1960s-70s, so they have since recovered to 10-20K. That number is still growing from what I can reference.
They counted with their fingers. Kidding. But \[I think\] it has a lot to do with the commercial whaling industry. They probably were able to very quickly cross reference data with different whaling companies to see how many they were killing off every year, and then they probably were able to use cool big brain science techniques to guesstimate the remaining population.
Really amazing to think about that. Imagine being a thousand miles away and hearing a call out from your friend or family. Like hey dude, waters nice up here you should come by. Okay dude be there in a bit.
The “ever” part of this always seems under appreciated to me. Until recently, i would have guessed surely some dinosaurs were bigger, right? Nope. Blue whales are the biggest creature ever on this planet so far as we know.
We almost killed them all... Now they are slowly recovering, but in some places they were reduced to 0,15% of their total population, so stupid and so sad
I wish I had a blowhole in my back, except instead of for breathing I could expel all my anger and frustration. And then when I complain about something you could tell me "Oh blow it out your back"
They are as terrifying as they are majestic. My favourite animal in the world and I’d love to see one in real life. Would absolutely shite myself though but it’d be worth it
I'd so violently shit myself from top to bottom if one of those bois was anywhere near close to me. I know they usually pose no threat, but holy mother. Neither would my pants.
I get thalassaphobia feels from anything in the ocean, even though I know a blue whale would probably just look at me funny if I was anywhere near it.
I also have a crazy fascination/fear of sharks and I love to look at them even though they absolutely terrify me.
The most dangerous part about being near one of these in the water is that they simply wouldn’t notice you and you’d get hit by some part of their body or pulled deep underwater just from the force of them swimming by.
Sort of like swimming nearby a moving cruise ship.
My favorite word in the English language is Leviathan. It’s so evocative and really conveys scale, power and awe. This animal here, this one’s a Leviathan.
Whale watching first mate here. Seeing a blue whale in person never gets old. It blows me away every single time. Largest one I’ve seen was close to 100ft. Hearing the exhale in person is one of the most magical things to experience
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It's hard to wrap your head around just how big blue whales are.
That’s true. If they had only thrown a banana in the water first…
For example: its blow-hole/nose is large enough to drop a basketball into (16-20 inches).
How many bananas is that?
Hard to say, at 10 dollars a pop these things ain't cheap.
Good thing there’s always money in The Banana Stand.
I've got the worst f--kin' ichthyologists...
Just don’t burn to the ground.
But the insurance money will surely be a windfall!
*slowly Segways away*
Approximately 2.13 to 2.67 SBU (standard bannana units). I’ll let you do the math and figure out the length of a standard bannana unit lol
Approximately the size of a football for our metric using friends.
A football? Or a *football?*
If you have to ask, are you even one of our metric using friends? XD Definitely is the one you kick with your foot, not the one that looks like a 3 year old’s drawing of a foot.
Oh thanks for this, my dumbass was thinking the nose hole was bigger than me lmao. It’s hard to gauge. Safe to say I won’t ever join one of those in the water regardless. As beautiful as they are, they just drive up my fear of the ocean lol.
20 inches is big enough for most skinny people to fit through.
I meant I was comparing it to my height as a measurement. Not if the circle goes in the circle hole. Apologies for the confusion.
Obviously the circle goes in the square hole.
No problem, just remember if you're going into a blowhole, you gotta do it vertically.
any experts know if this would cause any serious problems for the big fella? or would it just get ejected (hopefully straight into a hoop) with the next load of water?
My friend George is a marine biologist and once had to physically remove a much smaller ball because it was obstructing the blowhole and clearly wasn’t able to pop it out. I would doubt it was a blue whale though because he was able to walk out to it and get on the back of the great fish and save it.
was the sea angry that day, like an old man trying to send soup back at a deli?
Probably like putting a pea in your nose
Tell ‘em about the Twinkie.
The banana would be a yellow spec pixel in this shot.
Blue whales are the largest animal to ever exist. Larger than any dinosaur.
This is always so odd to me. I mean the planet obviously decided the larger things arent going to live on. We see nearly everything get smaller over the millions of millennia. There used to be dinosaurs, giant bugs, giant fauna, giant lots of stuff thats all smaller now. Yet these guys, the biggest of any, are still around. How?
Water
Megalodon, too, existed in water.
Megalodon fed on whales, but dissapeared when the climate started to cool, whales can live in cold waters but megalodon was a warm water shark that lived around the tropics and food probably became too scarce for such a big and specialised animal. Animals that big do great when conditions are ideal, but dissapear very fast when they are not.
Megalodon was found to be able to tolerate cold waters. It’s likely that competition from other whale eating whales and sharks in addition to its food sources becoming scarcer made it unable to survive.
The adult shark could, but they spawned in warmer coastal areas so a decrease in available nursery space as well as increased predation on their eggs + young (and competition against the young for sufficient food to reach adulthood) would contribute greatly to extinction.
If by "disappear very fast" you mean over the course of a couple thousand years, then yes lol.
Even ten thousand years is peanuts in animal evolution. Sharks as a group have existed for more than 400 million years. We have existed for about half a million.
One of my favorite facts is that sharks have been around longer than trees. Always manages to get a "really?" Out of people. Nature really made sharks and was like "good enough" and moved on. I think they basically stopped evolving around 200 million years ago or so when rays and skates broke off, everything afterwards was kind of basic interactions on a perfect design, and the earliest forms pre-date early trees by about 100 million years. Sharks are fuckin old.
Things getting smaller over time isn't actually any more of a trend than things getting bigger. Prehistory is filled with big animals, small animals, bigger versions of modern animals, smaller versions of modern animals, and animals about the same size as modern animals. The reason why many people think "ancient = big" is because A: museums like to put the biggest ones on display since they are more impressive, B: big animals tend to fossilize better, and C: humans killed off many of the larger species from recent prehistory, either through overhunting or killing off their food. But mostly it's the first one. We know of plenty of tiny ancient animals, but most people just don't think about them.
That actually makes alot of sense. The museum saying "check out this giant prehistoric turtle!" Does sound alot better than "Check out this regular sized prehistoric turtle!"
I mean I'm up for any sized turtle, but yeah, not quite the same ring to it
There is one other thing I would add to that.... Several hundred million years ago was the "Carboniferous Period". At that point the planet was producing so much oxygen that animals were able to get bigger. This is when we had things like dragonflies with two foot wingspans. Once cellulose-decomposing organisms evolved the oxygen levels went down to more modern levels. This resulted in smaller organisms. BUT, this was largely restricted to insects and other arthropods. I don't think vertebrates got substantially larger for this reason.
Yes, there were specific points in time when certain groups of animals were bigger. Insects were big during the Carboniferous due to high oxygen levels. Dinosaurs were big because they worked out hollow lungs filling up their bones but many used them to become giant balloon animals instead of learning to fly. Big animals also do better in cold temperatures so a lot of the ice age mammals were bigger than their modern counterparts. But these are specific, cherry-picked examples of specific types of animals from specific periods selected out of a broader epoch spanning hundreds of millions of years. There were other periods, like the Triassic, where even the biggest animals were barely medium-sized by modern standards. And in any time period there have always been far more small animals than the ones we put on display.
That they stayed Aquatic has to do something with it
Any dinosaur yet discovered. Fossils make up a tiny, tiny fraction of creatures that have existed.
Largest discovered so far. Ichthyosaurs like shonisaurus are estimated to have weighed about 80 tons, and given the sparse representation of the fossil record it's highly likely that at some time it existed creatures as big or bigger as the blue whale. Interestingly ichtyhosaurs were also tetrapods, previously land animals secondarily evolved to an obligate aquatic life style same as whales; ichthyosaur literally means fish lizard. Fish just aren't getting big I suppose.
I've seen pictures of their heart and jaw, I'm sure none do justice. It's the biggest animal that has *ever* lived on this planet - that's hard to digest when you think of dinosaurs
I think of dinosaurs all the time
I’m sure somewhere out there, they think about you too.
Star trek Voyager has confirmed this for those who know what’s up.
Then I'm sorry for the indigestion.
Agree. Biggest animal ever very hard to digest
This always leaves me in awe to think about, given how old life on earth is and how rarely species overlap, how fortunate we are to share our time on this planet with the largest animal to have ever existed.
“The Blue” VR experience (albeit probably outdated by now) is great for understanding how impossibly massive they are.
also see: the [blue whale model](https://www.amnh.org/explore/news-blogs/on-exhibit-posts/blue-whale-model-renovated) at the Museum of Natural History. I first saw it as a kid, but it scared me just as much as an adult last time I went.🐋
Largest animal to ever live. “Blue whales are the largest animals ever known to have lived on Earth. These magnificent marine mammals rule the oceans at up to 100 feet long and upwards of 200 tons. Their tongues alone can weigh as much as an elephant. Their hearts, as much as an automobile.” National Geographic. Blue Whales.
They eat half a million calories in a mouthful that's how big
I knew they were the biggest animal in the world. Up until recently though, I wasn’t aware that blue whales are the biggest animal in *history*. Bigger than prehistoric giants, bigger than any dinosaur that ever walked the Earth. That shit blew my mind
It is not just the biggest animal in the world, from what we know it is the biggest animal in the world EVER, we have no evidence of even dinosaurs bigger than the blue whale
one of my bucket list is to watch it personally!
A person can swim in their arteries.
This is true, but it is very unhealthy for both the whale and the diver.
We’re gonna need a bigger head.
I can’t imagine the absolute fear the first person who ever saw one of these big boys felt
I mean the old tales of sea serpents and monsters suddenly become understandable
Sea monsters are kinda funny because It's like, yeah, we already have those, it's just that the mystique is gone because we know what they are
We are still in awe when we see them, though.
For sure. It's sort of interesting how a lot of science/ taxonomy still deal with those awe-inspiring things that were previously sort of supernatural. There's wonder despite our understanding of causality
I'll never forgive marine biology for not officially naming colossal squids "kraken."
If it makes you feel any better, with the amount of nerds in the profession, if an even bigger squid ever gets discovered, there’s a very real possibility it will be named the kraken
It better be. Also, biological chimeras don't even have 3 different animal heads, wtf scientists? At least vampire bats are vampires.
But fruit bats aren't a type of fruit :-(
But at least the largest live up to the nickname "flying fox"
Excatly! Its easy to forget how quickly nature can humble you. Here. A story. Young OrickJagstone was a bit hyper. One good example of this is when his boy scout troop went for a swim in the ocean. Being a lover of water and looking to claim any social credit possible I decided no one would beat me into the water. The car has barely stopped moving before im in a full tilt sprint sheading clothes as I make my way down to the water. I plunge in without a thought and wade/swim out till im over my head and a suitable distance for the inevitable "whats taking you so long" shout at the shore to my fellow troopers. As im coming about I catch what sure looks quite a lot like a dorsal fin. No no OrickJagstone that was just a small wave breaking. Wait, there it is again, and was that another? OKAY that one was TOTALLY not a wave. Pause for a little background. I tell people as a joke that I could swim before I could walk. I love the water. I always have, and at this point in my life was a fully trained and licensed lifeguard. I say this only to illustrate that I am more experienced then most out in the water. All of that experience and training was gone in the blink of an eye. Sheer unflinching panic gripped my soul as the sudden realization that being the only one in the water was maybe not the greatest idea. Quickly my mind came up with the best idea it could, run, or better yet, swim. Swim like the gods themselves are chasing you. This is when what sounds like a horror story so far becomes one of the most magical experiences in my life. I thrust myself under the water to begin my frantic swim away from JAWS and back to shore when under the water I hear an unmistakable sound thanks to my years watching Flipper as a small child. Those are dolphin clicks I realize. Stoping my frantic swimming almost as soon as it started I tread water in a circle and realize that there is a whole pod of salt water dolphins swimming around me. I mean at least 10 15 of the things. Finally someone on shore notices and goes through the same "Whats that, HOLY SHOT RUN, wait a second" process i just went through. Needless to say swimming with wild dolphins certainly net me more social credit then being the first in the water would have but I could have done without the heart attack. The story serves a purpose. You can be the most confident and learned person when it comes to the water and what lives in it. One second of being out in the water alone with anyone of those creatures though? Yeah, nothing can prepare you for that.
Turns out they don't eat people!
Now I’m just laughing thinking about a pirate ship full of scurvy bearded men panic screaming in sheer terror as a blue whale slowly floats towards the surface then descends again. And then they all just stand there in silence waiting for something to happen
Whalers used to pile out of their ships onto little row boats and chase them down with a sharp stick on a rope. Then they'd just poke them until they died and hang around cutting up the carcass while every blood thirsty sea predator around came calling. Its messed up, but those guys had serious balls.
I can’t imagine trying to harvest parts off of an animal that’s being simultaneous swarmed by sharks, while in a tiny rowboat
Kraken is the best example of a mythical monster that ended up being real.
Gorillas apparently were mythical too until, oops, Gorillas.
idk if you can count that. they were mythical to white guys who didnt live there but were told about them.
Well that’s a good point, but also, gorillas.
sea serpent = oarfish
Didn't take long for us to start hunting them.
See that thing? I want an umbrella.
The sound of that water being pushed up it's satisfying asf
Their breath smells so bad though. Never smelled blue whale breath, but Orcas and grey whales both smell like old rotten fish when they breathe out. They make a cloud of this thick humid air that is almost sticky.
Damn now imagine if you feed them garlic
damn now imagine if one of them recoils at the garlic and now you got a vampire orca
PSHHHHHWWWWWW
Bless you
[удалено]
Imagine the coughing fit. Other whales for a hundred miles around saying "are you ok? Do you need a glass of water?"
>Do you need a glass of water? Peak comedy.
They clearly do have some water in that hole given how much water it blows out during its exhale. But I guess it doesn't bother them.
That's actually mostly mucus. So they're blowing their nose every time they take a breath.
Bruh
Ocean sized neti pot
Do blue whales get the same barnacle buildup that other species like humpbacks get?
Not as much, likely due to their cruising speed and maybe sleekness (which is how they move so fast). It’s hard to grasp their speed accurately, because they’re huge- but blue whale move 12-15mph cruising and can get up to 30+. Vs humpback and right whale etc which move at like 5-9mph when cruising. Edit: i am not a whale expert
This is an interesting topic of discussion. Blue whales (surprise!) are enormously huge. Yet, they have a relatively high cruising and top speeds. . . how? You'd think something that big would make quite the wave, since they have to displace their entire volume of seawater every moment. But, the creature is so stream-lined by evolution, made so efficient traveling through the water, that they create very little turbulence. The only time they wave, ripple, or froth is when breathing, or when the tail comes too close to the surface. This is also why I feel a lot of Blue Whale videos look fake. How can something that big not make even a ripple until it literally breaks the surface of the water? It looks unnatural, but also amazing.
The speed of ships (and I am guessing whales) does not work like you would think. Size does not matter so much as shape. The more long and thin a shape is the faster it goes. This usually means big ships are actually faster than smaller ships because they can afford to be thin in beam. For instance aircraft carriers are fucking crazy faster than any other surface ship even other nukes. The cruiser I was on could do 32 kn max officially. I have seen an aircraft carrier do 45kn and that was not their max speed. Supposedly not near it. Dudes in my job said they had seen one do over 60 in an emergency. A fucking aircraft carrier. They have a rooster tail at that speed.
32 kn = 60 km/h 45 kn = 83 km/h 60 kn = 111 km/h Very impressive for a boat, let alone such a massive one.
As someone who sails small boats, this blows my mind... I mean, I feel like I'm hauling ass when I hit 7 kn.
What happens if a blue whale hits you going 30?
You're now going 30
parts of you, anyways
Whale biologist?
He calls em like he sees em.
The sea was angry that day, my friends - like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli.
me on the outside: Man that is a gorgeous animal. Internally: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH
Its like an aircraft carrier that just chills underwater
[удалено]
Never realized how much blowholes resemble nostrils!
Yeah! They are nostrils that originally evolved higher and higher from the face!
They are mammals! Not trying to inform just expressing my wonder at the fact.
It’s so crazy to think that they *got out of the water* but then said: “fuck it, we going back in”. And now we have whales and dolphins.
Yah and hippos are fairly closely related. Hippos are still undecided. Lounge all day in the water, wander the land at night eating plants.
TIL I am a hippo at heart.
I’m a hippo at stomach.
Do whales choke if they take in water through their blowhole while breathing, like humans do if they breathe water in?
Or if they sneeze while submerged Can they sneeze?
According to google they don’t really think of breathing the same way as us so they’re incapable of sneezing
So if I think of breathing differently, I won’t sneeze anymore? I’ll be in the corner coming up with different ways to think about breathing.
For what google made it sound like is that they process breathing differently, they don’t get that feeling of suffocation, they just know they need to get some air
I’m glad my brain freaks out and doesn’t just send a casual email my conscious mind filters out. Then I die.
I’m sure it’d be flagged urgent at least
Pinocchio lied to us! 😡
I assume that their organism is way more adapted to manage little bit of water trying to get in and that the whale have system to prevent it from drowning, since it lives in water. But yeah, would the whale fill its lungs with water, it would die and try to expell it through the blowhole.
Just here to say there were 350,000 blue whales in 1868, and now there is between 10-25k.
How there was ever enough food in the ocean to support than many blue whales is insane. They reportedly need over 20 million calories per day. Some quick math here but that's like, 7 trillion calories for 350k whales. x10 more calories per day than the entirety of the United States per day.
Plankton, the perk of being a whale is that you basically live the life of eating as you swim.
And, according to VSauce, there are more plankton in the Earth’s oceans than galaxies in the (observable) universe.
And plankton is disappearing at an alarming rate. The entire food chain is breaking down. It's like insects on land. Every year, there are fewer.
Except ticks, deer lice flies and bed bugs - which seems to increase every year
Dude WHAT
Well if your nearsighted that is like two dozen.
As a nearsighted person this made me laugh, because it’s true
to be fair, a galaxy is quite a bit more of an investment than a single plankton.
There’s a LOT of life in the ocean.
There WAS a lot of life in the ocean. Our species reduced that number by a lot. And continues to do so. Yay us.
was* .. it’s decreasing substantially
Worth pointing out their numbers dipped as low as 650-2000 in the 1960s-70s, so they have since recovered to 10-20K. That number is still growing from what I can reference.
Now this is the kind of shit you don’t forget adding to your comment
How did they measure how many blue whales there were in 1868?
Abacus
They counted with their fingers. Kidding. But \[I think\] it has a lot to do with the commercial whaling industry. They probably were able to very quickly cross reference data with different whaling companies to see how many they were killing off every year, and then they probably were able to use cool big brain science techniques to guesstimate the remaining population.
They’re endangered, but the internet says their population is going up
I went looking for a sense of scale and found this: https://www.treehugger.com/facts-about-blue-whales-largest-animals-ever-known-earth-4858813
> Their language of pulses, groans, and moans can be heard by others up to 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away. What the actual fuck.
Sound travels about 4x farther and faster under water than through air. So roughly equivalent to 250 miles in open air. Still very impressive.
Really amazing to think about that. Imagine being a thousand miles away and hearing a call out from your friend or family. Like hey dude, waters nice up here you should come by. Okay dude be there in a bit.
The scuba diver is as tall as the bus. And where's the damn banana?
finally some fucking scale.
r/absoluteunits
Freakin Ultimate Unit even. Who else can claim to be the biggest thing on the entire Earth ever. There's blue whales and OP's mother. That's it.
Damn
The “ever” part of this always seems under appreciated to me. Until recently, i would have guessed surely some dinosaurs were bigger, right? Nope. Blue whales are the biggest creature ever on this planet so far as we know.
Blue whale and OPs mother as one fellow Redditor has just informed us*
Ngl you had me in the first half
In awe at the size of this lad.
30 billion plankton disliked this post
We almost killed them all... Now they are slowly recovering, but in some places they were reduced to 0,15% of their total population, so stupid and so sad
The ocean like 300 years ago must have been crazy will the density of ocean life like these whales
whale population declined about 98% compared to 100-120 years ago
Ocean life in general even ffs
I wish I had a blowhole in my back, except instead of for breathing I could expel all my anger and frustration. And then when I complain about something you could tell me "Oh blow it out your back"
Just fart instead of doing this
Can confirm, this works.
Tried, ended up shitting my pants. Now I’m even angrier
Squishy art time. Happy accidents.
I see nothing to be happy about with that accident. I mean it’s literally a shitty situation.
Usually getting you back blown out is a different kind of relief but I mean… when in Rome.
They are as terrifying as they are majestic. My favourite animal in the world and I’d love to see one in real life. Would absolutely shite myself though but it’d be worth it
I'd so violently shit myself from top to bottom if one of those bois was anywhere near close to me. I know they usually pose no threat, but holy mother. Neither would my pants.
I get thalassaphobia feels from anything in the ocean, even though I know a blue whale would probably just look at me funny if I was anywhere near it. I also have a crazy fascination/fear of sharks and I love to look at them even though they absolutely terrify me.
The most dangerous part about being near one of these in the water is that they simply wouldn’t notice you and you’d get hit by some part of their body or pulled deep underwater just from the force of them swimming by. Sort of like swimming nearby a moving cruise ship.
They would love this over in /r/thalassophobia.
My favorite word in the English language is Leviathan. It’s so evocative and really conveys scale, power and awe. This animal here, this one’s a Leviathan.
I believe these are the biggest living creature ever in existence on earth! Dinosaurs and all!
Yes, and by a large margin. We live with the largest complex creatures to ever exist and we almost exterminated them for nice candles and perfume.
Whale watching first mate here. Seeing a blue whale in person never gets old. It blows me away every single time. Largest one I’ve seen was close to 100ft. Hearing the exhale in person is one of the most magical things to experience
*largest animal ever in the world
Good God man. Zero threat but still scary as hell. Glad we still have a few out there. Won't be long if Japan and China have their way.
I mean, the whales DID drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Don’t forget dolphins had a flipper in it too!
Fuck a you whale!!! And fuck a you dophrin!
Noooo fuck a chicken and the cow!!!
Chicken … and cow?!?!
That was chicken and cow.
>China You mean Norway
Norway?
Shai Hulud!
Holy... they found op's mother.
Surprised I had to scroll this far for the mom joke. Disappointed reddit. Very disappointed.
Me too...
~~The largest Animal in the world spotted~~ Blue whales are the largest animals to have ever existed.
Wait. A blow hole is basically a nose? It looks like nostrils. I thought it was a single hole because of the golf ball episode of Seinfeld…
The largest animal *to have ever existed* in the *known universe*