Big blue chonk

January 5, 2020 5:29 PM

“Up until recently, it seemed that our current surfeit of suspension-feeding giants – not just the blue whale, but others like the fin and sei whales – was a recent development. The biggest modern whales seemed to be far larger than their prehistoric counterparts, hinting that baleen whales have been ballooning (despite the fact that the marks of modern human whaling still marks the world’s oceans). But a paper published earlier this year documented a 1.5 million-year-old blue whale that stretched about 85 feet in life, hinting that the cetacean size boom has deep roots. And, coming at the question from another direction, marine biologist Jeremy Goldbogen and colleagues have outlined what might keep whales from getting larger. Namely, how much food they can sift from the seas.” The Biggest Whales Are Yet to Come (Scientific American)

Why whales are big but not bigger: Physiological drivers and ecological limits in the age of ocean giants (paywalled Science)

posted by not_the_water (2 comments total)

If they can evolve to eat plastic, they could be sooooo big
posted by Pastor of Muppets at 5:52 PM on January 5, 2020 [3 favorites]

BIG-HEARTED Incredible pictures reveal a beached blue whale’s heart that weighs 31 stone and is as big as a CAR – Gigantic ticker was taken out of the body of a whale which died after accidentally swimming onto a beach, The Sun, Jasper Hamill, 6 Jul 2017.

Although the Royal Ontario Museum’s Out of the Depths – The Blue Whale exhibit is currently closed, there’s a 3D walkthrough of it (by Holman Exhibits) showing the beached whale’s plastinated heart next to a Smart Car. More about The Painstaking Process of Preserving a 400-Pound Blue Whale Heart, SmithsonianMag, Jennifer Nalewicki, July 21, 2017

Baby, baby (HH 1965), can’t you hear my heart beat? (Stanford University Nov 2019).
posted by cenoxo at 8:07 AM on January 6, 2020 [1 favorite]