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Are dolphins your porpoise for living? Think orcas are killer? Maybe you start blubbering
when you think of belugas? That’s no fluke. Whales are one of the coolest groups of animals
on Earth, with so many specialized features that they might as well be from space. If
you’re looking for some of the most mind-blowing facts about these awesome marine mammals,
whale whale whale… you’ve come to the right place.
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When we say “whales”, we’re talking about the order of animals called cetaceans,
which are further divided into two subgroups, toothed whales and baleen whales.
Despite living their whole lives in the water, whales are in fact mammals. They give birth
to live young, they nurse with milk, and they’re warm-blooded. They even have hair! Before
they’re born, whales are covered in a layer of fuzz called lanugo, and some even keep
hair as adults.
Like all mammals and other tetrapods, whales are descendants of ancient fish that crawled
out of the water about 375 million years ago. But for some reason, cetaceans turned around
and crawled right back in the ocean. About 50 million years ago in what is now Pakistan,
four-legged wolf-sized creatures began to hunt in the water, and over time, evolution
selected for traits that helped them in their aquatic lifestyle.
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Cetacean nostrils gradually migrated back from their snout to on top of their head,
where we find them today. Baleen whales still have two holes up there, while toothed whales
only have one blowhole.
Because whales descended from animals with limbs under their bodies, their backbones
don’t naturally bend side to side, but rather up and down. That’s why their tail fins
are horizontal, instead vertical like fish! And even though they no longer have hind limbs,
their hips aren’t completely gone in some species. Vestigial pelvic bones are now used
to anchor the penises of male whales. Okay then…
Since they evolved from land mammals, it’s no surprise that whales still have ears, but
because of their deep-diving lifestyle they no longer have these floppy things to funnel
sound, and their ear canals are no longer open to the outside. But a lifetime’s worth
of earwax still builds up inside. Scientists can harvest these ear plugs from dead whales
and use em to study the diet and hormone levels every year the whale was alive, just like
really gross tree rings.
Toothed whales like dolphins and sperm whales use echolocation to hunt and navigate. Clicks
made in the nasal passages are focused by a mass of tissue in their foreheads called
the melon, and fatty tissues in their lower jaw pick up the returning echoes and deliver
the vibrations to the inner ear.
Baleen whales like humpbacks don’t use echolocation, but are famous for their WHAAAAALE SOOOOONGS.
"Spock, what do you make of that?"
Humpback whale songs are incredibly complex, with short phrases combined into themes that
are mixed into songs, each lasting half an hour or more. They’re like blubbery Beethovens!
We’re still not exactly sure how whales like humpbacks make those singing sounds,
but scientists think they might use a big sac under their vocal chords to squeeze air
into the larynx, kind of like a bagpipe, and then recycling it into their lungs so they
don’t waste a breath.
Whales are technically carnivores, and eat just about every kind of animal there is in
the ocean. Toothed whales like orcas, porpoises, and sperm whales eat everything from fish
to squid to seals, while baleen whales use their bristly namesake to filter small animals
like krill, plankton, and even fish from huge gulps of water.
When rorqual whales like humpbacks, fin whales, and blue whales sense food ahead, their mouth
opens almost 90 degrees and their split lower jaw bone spreads wide like a fishing net.
As they close their mouth, their giant tongue squeezes the water out through the baleen
filter, leaving tasty yum-yums behind.
Other baleen whales like bowheads don’t open their jaws as wide, but instead ram up
to 3000 liters of water per second out the corners of their mouth as they filter out
dinner.
No whale is as weird as the narwhal. Contrary to popular belief, they are not unicorns wearing
specially-designed SCUBA suits. Those huge tusks, usually found only on males, are actually
elongated canine teeth sticking right out the front of their foreheads. They don’t
have any teeth in their mouth, but those things more than make up for it. No one agrees what
the tusks are for, but some scientists say it’s a sensory organ, while others say it’s
just for males to attract females, but that doesn’t really matter because they’re
awesome. The Inuit even made harpoons out of narwhal tusks tipped with iron from a meteorite!
Are you kidding me?
A blue whale can eat as much as four tons of food in a day, and what goes in must come
out. When it comes to poop, whales go big. They often feed in the deep ocean, and their
poop brings those nutrients up to the surface, where they act as fertilizer for shallow ecosystems.
It’s estimated that sperm whales and the iron in their poop help sequester 200,000
tons of carbon from the atmosphere every year by fecally fertilizing photosynthetic plankton.
Whales set some amazing records, too. The deepest diving species, Cuvier’s beaked
whale, has been tracked to 3,000 meters below the surface! Some bowhead whales have been
found with harpoons dating from the 19th century still embedded in their bodies, leading scientists
to estimate their lifespan at up to 200 years!
Finally, like all animals, whales eventually die. When whale carcasses, sometimes weighing
more than a hundred tons, fall to the ocean’s dark depths, they can form mini-ecosystems
called “whale falls”, sustaining countless deep-sea species for decades. Strange creatures
like these “zombie worms” devour everything from the blubber to the bones.
Hope you enjoyed this fact-packed whale tale, and that you didn’t mind my orca-sional
bad puns. Now, if you’re watching this right when
it comes out, stay tuned because we’re bringing you a week of amazing ocean-related videos
from the Monterey Bay Aquarium. PBS and the BBC are teaming up for an incredible three
night event called Big Blue Live, where we’ll be bringing you some of nature’s greatest
ocean wonders right as they happen. I’ll have a bunch of videos here on It’s Okay
To Be Smart, as well as over on the PBS Facebook page. We’ll be talking about more whales,
otters, penguins, jellyfish, octopus, and a few more surprises.
I’ll put links to all that down below. You can check out pbs.org/big-blue-live for more
and I hope I’ll be seeing you from the Big Blue.
Stay curious!