THIS IS WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER TOUCH A DEAD WHALE
Before continuing, I just want to give you a quick warning as the following
video contains graphic content, so viewer discretion is advised.
It is no secret that there are things in nature that don't always make sense to
us. The wild is, well, a wild place and
seemingly anything can happen. The video was uploaded by a channel
named WTF! Outdoors went viral after it was uploaded on august 2nd of this year.
Now it has 17 and a half million views. The video shows footage of a dead whale
floating on the sea off the california coast, and the most shocking moment is
when the whale explodes like a scene out of a bloody horror movie.
This is not something for the faint-hearted, but the voyeurs inside of
us, it is kind of amazing to see I must say.
Even though this scene might be strange to us it's not something out of the norm.
So, this begs the question Why exactly do whales explode? Do all
animals explode when they die?
Some beachgoers have come across a whales or a dolphin's dead body washed
up on the shore. This is called cetacean stranding or
beaching and it refers to when large cetaceans aka aquatic animals strand
themselves on land usually on a beach. Cetaceans often die on the beach due to
dehydration, or by collapsing under their own weight since they feel the effects
of gravity more strongly when they're out of the water,
or they drown when high tide covers the blowhole.
Their washed up dead bodies then get very bloated, start smelling and
eventually explode. But in case you've been living in the
carcass of a dead whale at the bottom of the ocean, you probably didn't hear this
story about some people in oregon trying to remove a sperm whale carcass from a
beach in 1970. The whale was too heavy to move and the
locals couldn't cut it up as it would create one hell of a big mess.
People didn't know what to do with it or how to discard the body.
So they... blew it up by putting tons of dynamite
underneath the body, hoping it would blow into tiny pieces so scavengers could eat
them. I mean it's not the worst idea.
However it went terribly wrong as massive chunks of the whale's innards
showered the crowd of onlookers, even those standing up to a mile away, and the
foul smell of dead meat lingered for days on end. After doing some research, I
found out that after a whale dies its organs - stomach contents, bacteria, and
everything - begin to decompose. During decomposition, various gases like
methane and carbon dioxide are produced within its body.
But since there is a thick layer of blubber under the skin of whales, the
gases cannot escape. Thus they begin to build up inside the
whale's body causing it to bloat just like when we get bloated after
eating too much taco bell but instead of exploding we fart to release the gases
[Music] since the body of a whale is so large it
produces more gases that increase the pressure inside of their bodies
eventually due to the increased pressure the gases suddenly force the carcass to
pop open and this explains why whales bodies
explode when they die this process doesn't just take place in
whales it takes place in all dead animals including us humans
usually this process doesn't produce enough gas to cause their bodies to
explode not only because they are smaller animals but
also because their holes are looser
land animals don't have to worry about always keeping water out of their
orifices whales do and many whale species dive to
incredible depths where there's incredible pressure so they must have
you know tight holes
these whales also get heavy when they are beached since their bodies are not
supported by the water in the same way that they usually are
this means the pressure they experience when lying on the ground causes their
orifices to seal shut so long story short when you've got a
gigantic animal with a lot of gas building up inside of it that has no way
to escape well you're setting the stage for a bloody explosion
usually a dead whale becomes food for hundreds of animals in the sea its
carcass will sink down to the bottom of the ocean and create a little ecosystem
for the bottom feeders but sometimes the whale may float on the
surface due to air in its lungs or the gases that build up
so that's what probably resulted in the interesting video we talked about at the
start now smaller whales usually don't explode
like their larger counterparts because sea scavengers can break them down
pretty quickly and if they ever get beached and need to
be taken back out into the ocean it's easy to do that but larger whales like
sperm whales can weigh up to a hundred thousand pounds and dealing with this is
a hell of a nightmare often times the solution to remove them
is to first cut them into pieces but looking at this video a little curry
cutty can lead to a little explosion look at the steam coming out gross
imagine the stench coming out of that dead body it must have been awful
i got nauseous just by watching this
so yeah the whale didn't explode because it ate a bunch of firecrackers for lunch
but because of the decomposition process and the next time you see a dead whale
washed up on shore don't come near it or touch it or do anything else stupid like
jumping on it because it's gonna explode and that's how you'll turn into a
carcass as well