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Because they are filter feeders, they must filter out the water they take in before swallowing. Though they are the largest animals on Earth, these whales eat some of the ocean's smaller crustaceans.Ī blue whale will lunge its body through large krill swarms with their mouths open to take in as much as possible. This massive spermaceti organ is filled with fine, yellowish oil, which was once seen as a luxury in ancient whaling culture. So most of what you will find inside the head is not brain tissue but a special spermaceti organ used for echolocation.
What's even more interesting is that the size of a sperm whale's head makes up about one-third of its entire body. The sperm whale, on the other hand, has had the same size brain for about 55 million years, meaning not a whole lot of brain size evolution has taken place. For about 200,000 years, humans have had the same size brains that we have right now. The brain of a sperm whale weighs about 20 pounds, more than six times the weight of a human's brain.īrain size makes a lot more sense when you look at it from an evolutionary perspective. A fully-grown sperm whale has a brain that is about 500 in3, more than five times the size of a human brain, which is 80 in3. While blue whales take most of the "world's largest" records, the record for the largest brain on the planet goes to the sperm whale. Human hearts pump anywhere from 60 to 80 times per minute, pumping one gallon of blood through the body. So each minute, a blue whale's heart can pump more than 1,160 gallons of blood through its body. If all of that wasn't astonishing enough, a blue whale's heart will only beat around 8-10 times per minute. What's even more impressive is that most adult men could fit inside the heart of a blue whale. That is the same as a concert grand piano! Compared to the human heart, which measures about 0.77 pounds (or the equivalent to a can of chicken soup) the size of whale hearts make ours look pretty minuscule.
BIGGEST WHALE IN THE WORLD PROFESSIONAL
To put this in perspective, she weighed the same as about 30 standard elephants or 2,500 human adults.įUN FACT: Beyond these record-breaking feats, blue whales also have the largest hearts, heads, and tongues on the planet! In fact, an entire professional NFL team could stand atop a blue whale's tongue with room to spare.Ī fully-grown blue whale's heart weighs 1,000 pounds on average. That record goes to another female found in the Southern Ocean of Antarctica back in 1947, who weighed 418,878 pounds. However, she was not the heaviest whale ever recorded. This whale measured 110 feet and 17 inches feet in length. The longest blue whale record goes to a female discovered in the South Atlantic at the South Georgia whaling station back in 1909.
To put this into perspective, they are the same length as a professional basketball court, or two school buses lined up end to end.
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