#whale

www.sciencealert.com

Blue Whales Shouldn't Be Able to Hunt The Way They Do. Scientists Have Finally Discovered How They Pull It Off

When a blue whale dives below the waves, their heart rate plummets to conserve oxygen. Their massive hearts can slow to just two beats per minute as they dive hundreds of meters in search of food. If your heart slowed that much, you'd probably pass out. And yet, somehow, filter-feeding cetacean divers like the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) and humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) still manage to lunge after their food, in spite of the extreme bradycardia their bodies are experiencing. It has been described as the "largest biomechanical event on Earth", an impressive feat of sharp plunges, turns, and barrel rolls performed at depth to scoop up prey, when the whale's heart has slowed to a plod. Marine scientist Ashley Blawas is a researcher at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station. She led a study, recently published in PNAS, to understand how flexible whales' heart rates might be, given that they are also exerting large amounts of energy underwater. "The challenge whales and other divers face is that they have to balance this oxygen-conserving dive response with the need to perform potentially oxygen-demanding exercise while underwater to capture prey," Blawas told ScienceAlert. In previous work, Blawas and colleagues had taken measurements...

www.chinadaily.com.cn

World's largest whale graveyard discovered in the Indian Ocean

At nearly 7,000 meters below the surface of the southeastern Indian Ocean, an international research team led by Chinese scientists has discovered the deepest and largest whale graveyard ever recorded — a 1,200-kilometer stretch of seafloor littered with whale remains that have accumulated over at least 5.3 million years. The findings reveal that the region has served as a vast whale necropolis since the early Pliocene epoch, about 5.3 million years ago, hosting both active whale-fall ecosystems teeming with specialized deep-sea life and hundreds of fossilized cetacean skeletons. The study, conducted by researchers from the Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Hainan province, the University of Pisa in Italy and Earth Sciences New Zealand, was published in the journal Nature on June 10. The deep sea, a dark, high-pressure realm beyond 200 meters, hosts one of nature's most remarkable feats: whale falls. When a whale carcass sinks to the seafloor, it creates a self-sustaining ecosystem capable of sustaining communities of organisms for decades. Previously, the deepest known whale fall was recorded at 4,204 meters in the southwest Atlantic Ocean. Moreover, almost nothing was known about whale-fall life below 6,000 meters, and the deep-sea...

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Surfing Lennox Head, NSW - Australia - Part 1

YouTube video by henkopix