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Moby dick's kin the sperm whales are incredibly interesting. One of their remarkable ability is to dive deep, fast and long. Among all free diving warm blooded
by srean 13y ago
Moby dick's kin the sperm whales are incredibly interesting. One of their remarkable ability is to dive deep, fast and long.
Among all free diving warm blooded animals they go the deepest. They dive to depths 25 times deeper than their other equally famous and endangered cousin the blue whales. The blue whale is the largest known animal to have ever inhabited the earth.
To give an idea of how deep they dive, here is a picture http://i.imgur.com/ESp2j.jpg http://i.imgur.com/ESp2j.jpg It needs to be magnified for perspective and for the little surprise at the bottom.
It is interesting how they manage to hold their breath for so long and yet manage to survive the bends (decompression sickness).
The whales are seriously challenging our assumptions about animal intelligence, empathy, society, culture and language. For a long time we believed that the primates were at the top. Search Ted talks and youtube for dolphin intelligence, dont miss the Attenborough ones. For lack of a better word they are just amazing.
Dolphins are for example known to build difficult to make toys (air bubble vortex rings) just to entertain themselves.
They have to discover how to make it. Sometimes they can be quite possessive, they would break the toy if someone not so knowledgeable wants to play with it. Once a dolphin figures it out how to make one, his/her peers eventually figure it out too. So it kind of spreads within a group like fashion. This behavior has been observed both in captivity and in the wild.
Dolphins in captivity try to imitate us and seem to have no trouble mapping our body parts to theirs. A story goes that a scientist observing an young dolphin from an underwater portal had blown a cloud of cigarette smoke at it. The dolphin promptly went to the mother and did the same to the scientist with milk ! It is now strongly believed that they call each other by name. They try to imitate human speech which takes enormous effort on their part because unlike for example parrots their vocal tract is not conducive for this at all. People believe this to be an indication of their strong desire to communicate with us.
And they originated from ungulates: hoofed warm blooded animals. It came as a surprise to me that that there were hoofed carnivorous animals.
- teddyh 13y agoxkcd Lakes and Oceans: https://xkcd.com/1040/ https://xkcd.com/1040/
- cfontes 13y agoThat Kola borerole is a really interresting thing... Russians are awesome :D
- whatusername 13y agoIn case you didn't see the recent XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1330/ http://xkcd.com/1330/
- jonsen 13y agoIt is interesting how they manage to hold their breath for so long Large blood capacity for storing oxygen, I think. Whale beef is very red. and yet manage to survive the bends (decompression sickness) Well they don't breathe down there as human divers do. The excess nitrogen pressed into the blood is not more than what the lungs can take out again when rising.
- masklinn 13y ago> Whale beef I'm sure you meant "meat" > is very red. Indeed, it's almost black.
- bch 13y agoWhy not "beef"? They're called cows, bulls and calfs after all.
- masklinn 13y agoBeef is the culinary name of bovine meat[0]. Calling whale meat beef is roughly equivalent to calling cow meat "pork". [0] and afaik culinary names come from the corresponding animal's name in french: beef comes from boeuf (~ox, a castrated bos taurus male), pork from porc, veal is veau, mutton is mouton and venison is venaison (replaced by "gibier" in modern french).
- Patient0 13y agook I'll bite - what is the writing at the bottom of the picture?
- teddyh 13y agoI’m guessing it’s some variant of “Ia ia ia, Cthulhu f’tagn!”
- john2x 13y agoIt's a reference to H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu".
- agumonkey 13y agoTook me time to understand it wasn't unicode error but cthulhu runes. Well done.
- Spig 13y agoAt first I thought the lurker in the shadows was a smudge on my monitor.
- agumonkey 13y agothe '10% only' makes me wonder if Elon Musk has ever been interested into deep sea instead of mars-deep space. Also, Cameron is a monster : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepsea_Challenger#Challenger_Deep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepsea_Challenger#Challenger_... .
- bentcorner 13y ago> If the ballast weight release system fails, stranding the craft on the seafloor, a backup galvanic release is designed to corrode in salt water in a set period of time, allowing the sub to automatically surface. Not much to say about this other than that's particularly elegant.
- agumonkey 13y agoBeside very reassuring, yes it is. Secure + good sense.
- tttppp 13y ago>The blue whale is the largest known animal to have ever inhabited the earth. Arguably the heaviest, most likely not the largest.
- veidr 13y ago> most likely not the largest What is/was, then?
- osxrand 13y agoPossibly the Bruhathkayosaurus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruhathkayosaurus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruhathkayosaurus
- dfc 13y agoFirst sentence of article: Bruhathkayosaurus (/bruːˌhæθkeɪ.ɵˈsɔrəs/; meaning "huge bodied lizard") might have been the largest dinosaur that ever lived. The accuracy of this claim, however, has been mired in controversy and debate. All the estimates are based on Yadagiri and Ayyasami's 1989 paper, which announced the find.[1]
- antimagic 13y agoWhich is the largest then? Honest question, everything I've ever read says that it's the blue whale, and a quick check on Wikipedia still confirms this. There are some fossil fragments that suggest that some sauropods got bigger than this, but no complete fossils have been found that beat the biggest blue whales.
- masklinn 13y agoIf you like cetaceans, I strongly recommend Inside Nature's Giants s1e2 (Fin Whale) and s3special2 (Sperm Whale). s3special (Giant Squid) is also an interestingly related topic. And so are pretty much all other episodes.) > yet manage to survive the bends (decompression sickness). But still get it, I remember a report of sperm whale bones being full of holes from nitrogen bubbles.
- Argorak 13y agoAnother data point to imagine the depth: USS Thresher imploded at a depth of 1,300–2,000 ft. The implosion took 0.1 seconds. That was a ship of ~3500 short tons of mass. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Thresher_%28SSN-593%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Thresher_%28SSN-593%29
- huxley 13y agoThe Thresher eventually sank to 8400 feet. According to this article: http://www.navytimes.com/article/20130404/NEWS/304040021/50-years-later-look-what-really-sank-Thresher http://www.navytimes.com/article/20130404/NEWS/304040021/50-... the Thresher likely imploded after sinking to 2400 feet, "the water-ram produced by the initial breaching of the Thresher's pressure hull at 2,400 feet entered the pressure hull with a velocity of about 2,600 mph" 129 crew died, it was the worst submarine disaster in history (also the first nuclear submarine to have sunk).
- Ilverin 13y agoAs regards origination from ungulates: More recent data suggests origination from artiodactyls. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cetaceans#Earliest_ancestors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cetaceans#Earliest...
- trentmb 13y ago> People believe this to be an indication of their strong desire to communicate with us. I'd desperately try to reason with my captors too!