Blue Whales Explained: The Largest Animals Ever to Live

**Discussion begins at 4:00**

**Reproduction discussion 25:30  - 31:30**

The blue whales are the largest animals to have ever lived on Earth.  They are larger than any dinosaur, with hearts the size of small cars and voices so powerful they can travel across entire ocean basins.  Despite this, blue whales remain surprisingly mysterious.

This week we’re diving into the hidden world of these ocean giants.  How can an animal that grows longer than a basketball court is wide still manage to disappear into the vastness of the ocean?  How did they evolve to a point that nearly violates the laws of physic?  Why do some of their calls remain unexplained?  Could strange underwater sounds, including one of the most famous noises ever recorded in the deep sea, have been connected to these massive creatures?  From their incredible migrations and secret feeding grounds to the unanswered questions scientists are still trying to solve, we're exploring the mysteries that surround the blue whale.

Transcript

Hey, guys. Hey! Hey! Welcome back. Here we are again. The three scream queens all United one, two, three for one final episode of the season. Season and of our season three. Can you believe we've gotten this far? Guys, I cannot believe we've gotten this far. I can't believe it's been three years since Princess Di. Oh my God. It came on randomly in my on my Spotify when I was in the car, just like came on. And we've come a long way. It was so crazy. That episode also sometimes like right now when we're trying to record and I just was screaming at the equipment and Colleen was like, let me see it. Let's push this button. You would think that after three years we'd have figured that out. It's also the way you Google to get the website that you already have saved on your bookmark was killing me as we go to this finale. We do need to issue a retraction. We do? Yes. I hate to bring it up because Colleen was really proud of herself. She. Hell, she had her moment. One of the sources, the Google source said H. Pylori. Pylori. Pylori. But we have confirmed it is in fact, H. Pylori. So yes, there was no question in my brain. There was. You weren't here, but you weren't here to to, you know, double down. Right. So anyway h pylori guys let's I think we've been we've been hyping this one up all season. This is a great idea. And I started researching and it was a good one. Kate I'm excited to tell you guys about this. So today we're going to talk about the blue whale. Blue whales. But before we talk about it so is it time for our drink to drink? Check. Oh, we're having a pina colada. We balled out. Yeah. I used pure coconut milk and some pineapple juice and some rum. It's delicious. I usually like one of these when I'm at the beach. Like an all inclusive resort. It feels a little heavy sitting by the pool. A pool heavy for me right now, but I appreciate the effort you put into this, Kate. So yeah, I mean, it's fine. I don't I would say not my favorite drink, but it's good enough. You know who I think does like it over here though is Colleen, I love you because it's nice and cold. Is it cold enough for you? It's gotta be fresh, wicked icy. I did I put a lot of ice in this. Yeah, yeah. And then blended it in the Vitamix. So you know what? And she left the glass in the freezer for Colleen, so it would be nice. Nice old. Yeah. We know how our girl likes it. That's right. I want listeners to know I have the family over for Father's Day, and I was just dropping blue whale facts on them, and they were questioning me. And you know how I feel about that. But Captain Fred was googling fact checking me and my answers were checking out. So yeah, this might even be a good one for, you know, they're always saying, can you, can you do an episode that's kid friendly? This one's for the kids. This one is for the kids. Although I will say whatever. We talk about animals, we have to talk about reproduction, right? For sure. Always. I'll just give a I'll just give a trigger warning when we get to that part. So here we go. Despite being the largest animals to have ever lived on earth, larger than any dinosaur with hearts the size of small cars and voice is so powerful they can travel across entire ocean basins. Blue whales remain surprisingly mysterious. This week we're diving into the hidden world of these ocean giants. How can an animal that grows longer than a basketball court is wide, still managed to disappear into the vastness of the ocean? How did they evolve to a point that nearly violates the laws of physics? Why do some of their calls remain unexplained? But strange underwater sounds, including one of the most famous noises ever recorded in the deep sea, have been connected to these massive creatures, from their incredible migrations and secret feeding grounds to the unanswered questions scientists are still trying to solve. We're exploring the mysteries that surround the blue whale. Wow. Yeah, the blue whale is so mysterious. That's what makes it so interesting? I know I'm probably spoiling some things, but you really never see a mom and her calf, right, Megan? AM I am I spoiling these? No, but we're going to talk about that. Yeah, and their migration patterns are really interesting. Anyway, did you how did you hear about the blue? Like what got you into the blue whales? Uh, my friend, uh, Daniel in college, he was like, really into blue whales. He went through a phase when he was a child, and he would, like, sit there and, like, tell me multiple facts about the blue whale. And he was like, they're so fascinating. Um, he was also very much into wolves and bears, right? Yeah. Um, he probably also has ADHD. Okay. Sounds like something you might get along with Drew and Colleen. Oh, for sure, one hundred percent. Yeah. Is the Blue whale the one that's featured in the New York Animal History Museum? The one that's, like, dangling from the ceiling? That's a good question because it feels like the whole room. Yes, Colleen, you're right, I was right. Yeah. She's right. You were right. What I did not realize is that it really is the most massive creature creature, not even to be alive now, but to have ever lived there. Bigger than the freaking dinosaurs. Yeah, yeah. So the blue whale shouldn't even exist because the size is so large. If it were to live on land, the gravity would strain its limbs so much like it couldn't possibly exist if not in the water. Yeah. And it only works because it has buoyancy to support them, and because the body has adapted to expend minimal energy and be efficient in its feedings. So remember Colleen told us all about the megalodon last season. Mhm. Colleen, do you remember how big the megalodon was? Um, about like eighty feet. That's right. Yes, eighty feet and up to seventy tons. And we thought that is massive? Yeah, right. What if I told you that the blue whale puts the megalodon to shame? Wow. Coming in at one hundred feet long and up to two hundred tons, at least the female. Because the females outweigh the males by about fifty tons. Wow. So they weigh as much as the Statue of Liberty. Length of the blue whale, if you want to quantify it, is at one hundred feet. That is three school buses. End to end. That's crazy. That's the equivalent of an eleven story building on its side. That's crazy. So again, as far as we know, the blue whale is the largest animal to have ever graced the planet. And not just the largest, but it is nearly double the size of the next largest animal. What's the next largest animal? I believe it's the sperm whale. Oh, the blue whales. Tongue alone weighs as much as an elephant. That's crazy. About a hundred people can fit in a blue whale's mouth. Wow. Its heart, as I mentioned, is the size of a car. Its eyes the size of a basketball. It doesn't sound very big, though. And a small child could swim through its arteries. No. That's crazy. No, all of the arteries are just like it's it through its largest arteries. Okay. That's crazy. Like it's pulmonary artery. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Their blowhole. It's. It actually has like two blowholes. It's like a, like there's like a nostril. So it's what it looks like one, but it's, it's divided two in the same spot. It has a septum. It has a septum. Exactly. Okay. And the spray from the blue whales blowhole goes as high as a three story building. So thirty feet high. I want to know what its lungs are like. Well, let's go back to your last question. You guys are really bopping around. Where did it come from? Yeah. You guys both recognized that it came from land. Yeah. Fifty million years ago, the pack of cards. Otaki was a quadruped that roamed riverbanks. It was a what we call now the walking whale. So it was a whale with four legs. Over the next ten million years, they evolved into aquatic animals. I saw similar video where they just blew into the sea. No, literally the bloop. Yeah. Kind of like, you know, the humans became mermaids, right? Well, I think dolphins probably also descended from this as well. Yeah. Or something like this. They also, I think were on four legs. Yeah. They're mammals. So and so all of the whales that live today, all the different species of whales are descendants of this quadruped. Pakicetus Ataka. Yeah. Mhm. So they have ten million years to evolve into these ocean creatures. And then about forty million years ago, the whale split into two subtypes the toothed whales and the baleen whales. So the blue whale is a type of baleen whale because they don't have teeth. Where I talk about their mouth, it's like brush. Yeah. As opposed to like actual teeth. Teeth. Okay. Like like the orca, if you will. Exactly. So then for the next, you know, forty million years, we have these subtypes. And then ten million years ago, the baleen whale split into two subtypes. The rorqual have loosely hinged mouths and had lined wrinkled skin folds that allowed their bodies to expand. So when you look at a picture, the bottom of their body in the front is sort of accordion style, right? And it stretches. It's very wrinkled. Oh, okay. Mhm. And so this allows their body to expand, which allows them to lunge feed, which is how they eat so efficiently. We're going to talk about that. But the theory is they were not as big as they are. And then suddenly like five million years ago, they just quadrupled in size. And they think that was because of global warming caused an increase in their food, the krill in the krill. Yeah. And they were so efficient eating, you know, so many calories in that they were able to expand. And then they became the massive creatures that they are now. That's crazy. Oh, that is so interesting. Yeah. Because they like fill up with water and then keep yeah. Grill all the krill stays in the mouth and the water. But also, you know how I know this. You guys ever watched the TV show flapjack? No, no, he lives in the whale. The whales. Like his adoptive mother. A really weird show for the listeners. Look up flapjack. Is it Cartoon Network? Yeah, I bet it is. They are always weird shows. I love that show. I hate Cartoon Network. It all goes back to like when I watched Rugrats and they would like at the beginning, they like squirted milk on all the like people. And then it like came out and was like, Rugrats, I love rugrats. Well, hold on and in. When I was a child, I was like, I don't understand how they're able to wipe themselves down and then suddenly be on the same like doing something else. I was like, it happened so fast. I could not conceptualize that it wasn't real anyway. And then Cat dog the way cat dog, oh, cat dog was weird and the way they would like run around the world. And I was like, how? And again, like, how do they poop? Do they poop out of each other's mouths? I had never answered. Exactly. I had so many questions about cartoons that I just didn't watch them because I was like, none of this makes. There's no rules anywhere. This makes sense because Colleen has a very creative mind, is very imaginative, and Kate and I like rules to understand things. Yeah. So kind of a second because you guys mentioned the teeth and I wrote. Do you guys remember learning about their teeth in school? And obviously you do. Yeah, but I didn't learn in school, but it was kind of a trick question because they don't have teeth. As you pointed out, they have up to eight hundred plates of whale bone with thick, coarse bristles that act as a filter, as you mentioned. So they don't really eat large prey. This is they sustain themselves on krill, which are like little shrimp, like crustaceans that are zero point five to two and a half inches large. So I think bigger than the immortal jellyfish, probably. But small creatures ram. They're the most abundant animals on earth. That's crazy. I was thinking about this today. How fast do the krill have to multiply to continue to feed the blue whale? Like how fast? Well, we're going to talk about some of the threats. But if you think about if anything ever happens with the krill, that's the whales are gone. The whales. Right. So the blue whales obviously need a lot of krill to sustain themselves. Well, they need a lot, six tons or twelve hundred pounds of krill per day. That's crazy. So they do this lunge feeding, okay, where they kind of go up and down and they again, the whole goal is they can't spend a lot of calories to sustain themselves, right? They have to everything has to be like very passive, if you will. Yes. So they swim along, they, they open their mouth. This massive hinge, they take a huge gulp of water and they take in one hundred and twenty five percent of their body weight in water and krill, two hundred and fifty tons in a single bite. Wait, I have so many questions. How can there be. I can't conceptualize how much water that is water and at all water at all. It's like Pac-Man, but I feel like it has to be open a really long time to get that. Well, no, because I'm going to tell you how it works. Okay, okay. But before I tell you that just to finish this sort of. So they take in this large gulp, right. As you guys described their. Then their esophagus, their tongue is used to push the water back out of their mouth, but it filters through the, the whale bone. So, so what's left in their mouth is the krill and none of the water. Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's like a sifter. But what makes them interesting again, when I was like, they are not like other animals and they really shouldn't. It's like they just touch the lines of like physics, like they they could be so close to not being real. Exactly. But they have these mechanisms that they adapted that that make them exist. So I told you about their large wrinkly mouse, right? So, so they have these massive mouths. Most creatures surface area is their length squared. That's their surface area. And then their length cubed is their volume. Yeah. But whales volume is their length to the fourth power because they have this large expanding mouth. So it's like they have more volume than any other creature for its length, right. For height. Yeah. And so again, it's all about this wrinkle. So when they open their mouth they don't I don't think they really have to. It's like having a balloon or like a bag, right. As you drag it in the water, it just fills up and that's it. So I don't think they like a pelican beak. Yes. Yeah. So I don't think they have to keep like, keep their mouth open for a long time. And they just like swim along. They do like an open a Pac-Man, as you described. Okay. It all fills up in the bottom of this stretchy mouth chin. And then they filter it out and are left with the krill. I guess they don't. They don't take in a breath through their mouth, do they? Through the blowhole. Through the blowhole. Right. So is it completely separate like their trachea versus their esophagus? It's not like humans where like, we would not be able to take multiple bites without having air in between. Oh. Newborns can though. Yeah. I guess like newborns. But like I, I'm thinking maybe they're just separate from like, not like we take in air going through the same path. I wonder if it's a different type of path. Like there's esophagus. And then like maybe there blowhole is maybe it goes parallel like they do in a human, but maybe the opening is separate. I don't know. There's a way we could look this up. They're completely separate. The trachea connects the blowhole to the lungs for breathing. The esophagus connects the mouth to the stomach. Okay. Breathing out your back. I know somebody who is in medicine who was asked to come to the zoo to bronch a dolphin. That's crazy. And they had to go through the blowhole. Oh, that makes sense. Interesting. So, Megan, you should have known. And then as far as their feeding, you kind of mentioned Kate, their interesting migratory patterns, right? So they go to the poles, North pole, South pole in the summer to feed. And it's sort of like they, I mean, they, they're going to eat year round, but this is when they get most of their nutrition. So they have to store a lot of it. And it's like the bears or whatever, right. Let's rotate which pole they go to. Some of them go north, some of them go south. And apparently they have really good memories about like where the food is or they know where to go. They do have very good memory about. Yes. And that's I did see that. That's how they track back to where they where they got food before. And so they go there in the summer to feed, and then they come back to warm waters in the winter to breed. So again, they spend like four months in the summer just taking in nutrition, sometimes gaining fifty percent of their weight. And then they use those stores during the winter months to help survive. When krill is less densely populated, they don't live like in the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean, like they're like more in the Indian Ocean, right? Um, they are in the Pacific. There's actually a lot in California. Oh, as far as we know, I think they're everywhere. But there's we're going to talk about the numbers. There's definitely not very many of them left. Yeah. Yeah. And and they are very solitary animals. They don't live in. We'll talk we're gonna talk about all this. Okay. Other fun facts. They live eighty to ninety years with the oldest known whale to be one hundred and ten. How do we know this, you might ask? Um. The earwax. The earwax? Wow. Yes. It's like the rings in a tree. Yeah, right. We age a tree by the rings. So each year, based on the season and the migration and feeding times, they get a light layer of wax and a dark layer of wax. And it just builds and builds and builds. So when they find a whale, blue whale, they look at the earwax and they use it like tree rings to age the blue whale. Do they not have to scoop the wax out the wax? It helps them hear better. It like, makes the sound travel to their inner ear better. So it's actually they need the wax beneficial. Yeah. They generally. So about five miles per hour. And then there was a lot of variation. Like it was like, we think they might swim as fast as thirty miles per hour. But the fastest we've seen on satellite is twelve miles per hour. When they do go that maybe thirty miles per hour, that guesses, that's when they're like fleeing from a boat. And when they're doing their mating ritual, which we call the Roomba. Let's stop. Wait, that's so funny. Like the vacuum? Yeah. They don't usually breach because it expends so much energy. The deepest depth we have seen them is one thousand six hundred and sixty feet. How often do they have to breathe? That's a good question. We think they can dive for over thirty minutes, but the longest dive we have observed was about fifteen minutes. So I guess that means they must come up to breathe every fifteen, ten to twenty minutes. However, when they're actively foraging for food, they may need breath more quickly. So every eight to twelve minutes. But they have a theoretical breath holding limit of thirty to ninety minutes. Their peak heart rate is thirty seven beats per minute. Oh shut up. I want to know what their cardiac output is. And when they dive, their heart rate drops to two beats per minute. I want to know what the heart rate heartbeat sounds like. And why does it go down if they go? Is it does it have a pressure? Is it the pressure? Yeah. Like and the way that the body is responding to like more like it doesn't want to do as much decreasing metabolic demands, right? That's what their whole body is created to do that. That's wild. And they're so big. Well, again, that's why they're so big, right? Because they, they can't be burning calories. They've, they've really designed a body to do the least. Yep. Vocalizations. Let me talk about that. So in nineteen ninety seven, a mysterious sound echoed through the depths of the Pacific Ocean. Have you guys heard of this? Yeah. The one of a kind whale. The. No. Oh, well, I'm talking about a particular thing. It was the bloop. Yeah. Have we heard of bloop? Yeah. Yes. Okay. And they think it's a a whale. That's like mixed. That's been debunked. Oh, okay. So when did that get debunked? I just watched a documentary. I know there's a Netflix documentary about it. Yeah, but it's been debunked. So it was detected by a network of underwater hydrophones operated by NOAA, and the sound was unlike anything scientists had ever heard before. It was an ultra low frequency noise so powerful that it was picked up by sensors more than three thousand miles apart. The sound rose rapidly in frequency over the course of about a minute, giving it an eerie, almost vocal quality. It's sad because it originated from a remote region of the South Pacific and didn't immediately match any known geologic or man made source. One of the most popular theories was that the bloop had been produced by an enormous marine animal, possibly even a blue whale. Based on the low frequency. But again, because this noise was detected thousands of miles apart, there were even theories that this could have been like an undiscovered sea monster or something. Right? It was something creepy in the ocean. It had never been heard before. So there were all these theories, but one of them that was sort of the leading theory for a while was that this was a whale, because they thought the sound kind of resembled the vocalization of the whale. And while the sounds did share a similar frequency, the bloop lasted nearly twice as long as a normal blue whale call and had an unusual rising falling sweep and was louder than any whale range. So what it is now believed to be what they've now recognized it to be, is that it was probably a large fracturing of Antarctic ice, maybe an iceberg scraping the sea floor, or even just ice cracking because they have matched it. This was like much louder and longer than other recordings, but it was similar to what they've now recorded, other ice events sounding like, oh, okay, that makes me happy because before it was just a one of a kind whale and that like, they thought it was like a mixed race whale, like, like a different mom, different dad. And it couldn't bond with any pack and was just floating in the ocean, lonely forever. It's interesting you say that because blue whales can interbreed. And those those whales, the products of those interbreeding, continue to breed with other blue whales or other types of whales. So it sounds like they haven't been isolated like the theory was. Anyway, the point is, if a sound is mysterious, as the bloop could fool scientists for years, imagine how difficult it is to understand the creatures that produce some of the ocean's most powerful calls. So we really don't understand much about vocalizations of whales. It's really hard to even like. They can't track whales like they track other animals. If we were to like tag them, they're much more prone to infection. Oh, interesting. They have these parasites. They're really prone to infection, so causing a wound on them. Exactly. So what they do is they put these like they shoot them with these like suction cup things, these like cameras and monitors that monitor like their depth and their speed and all of that. And they go down, they just like track them for about eight hours. And then they, the thing falls off and they retrieve it. And at what point is that? We really don't know that much about blue whales. Here's what we do know. Blue whales are among the loudest animals on earth, producing deep, low frequency calls that can travel hundreds of miles through the ocean. This sound is louder than a jumbo jet. Wow. I would love to hear it, but it's not as loud as the sperm whale, which is the loudest animal in the ocean. And the second loudest is a type of shrimp, a pig. No way. Yes it is. Look it up. It's a pistol. Shrimp. And it's got a big claw. And it snaps its claw down. And the claw makes like a little explosion. And it gets up to like four hundred degrees Fahrenheit. And that little cloud, it makes a really loud noise and the heat and the sound alone suns their prey, and it kills them and or it either kills them or stuns them. And then that's how they eat. Look it up. Pistol. Shrimp. That's crazy. So scientists believe that the vocalizations help whales communicate across vast distances, coordinate migrations, and potentially locate mates. But despite decades of study, many questions remain unanswered. We know that they make the low sounds by blowing air through their vocal cords at a fast or slow rate. And when they repeat these sounds, they call them songs, but only men sing. So we think this is some sort of mating call. Oh, and the songs differ based on location, so we don't really understand the meaning behind these calls and why they have sort of like different dialects. But also the blue whale songs around the world have been decreasing in pitch over the last several decades as well, and they don't know what that's about. Like, why is it evolving? Why is it changing? So, um, does it have something to do with energy? Like how much energy it takes to create the song? Maybe, I don't know. It's weird that the, the woman make no sounds. As far as we know, it's the men making these calls. Do you have recordings? That's crazy, I don't think I think that's so cool. Yeah. It's creepy. And speaking of the mating call. MM. This is the point where the children can fast forward a couple of minutes. So as I mentioned, they are solitary creatures because it makes sense. They don't want to compete for food and they don't need help feeding. They don't like other animals, pack animals, right? They help each other get their prey. They don't need that. And if there's two of them in the same location, that's just half as much krill they're getting. So they actually prefer to just be by themselves, which feels very sad and lonely. Wait, I have a question. But don't don't the males like, find a female that they want to mate with and then they like, follow them around and like, fight off the other females? I'm so happy you mentioned that. Not quite, but close. Okay, so one mating season comes. All the blue whales go and gather near the equator to hook up. Yeah, I love it. And so again, males and females, they generally reach sexual maturity about five to ten years of age. Both males and females have a genital slit right near their anus. No, of course in women. And so again, I think that the point of this is like it needs to be very streamlined and not have to exert energy. So if it has like a penis hanging out or something that's gonna drag. Right, right. So everything is concealed in these genital slits. So for women within the slit, there is a vaginal opening. And then also there are two nipples and that is where they feed in the slit. Yes. For men they have this retracted ten foot long penis and testicles. Guess how much each of their testicles weighs. Um, five hundred pounds. Two tons. One hundred and fifty pounds. Climactic. Do you have a video of a mating? Feel free to. I'm gonna do that on my own. Okay. I want to see what? So wait, wait, wait. Flip it upside down. No. Their belly to belly. Because the women can. They'll put their belly up out of the water to. When they don't want a man to put it in. Oh. Oh, okay. Starting at about five to ten years of age. These males and females, they meet up. We think this is that's maybe what's going on with these male mating songs that the males who are ready to mate, they start singing. And if more than one male shows up, they will have a race. And it was saying that generally what this is is two, two males on one female. And I don't know how. It's always like just two of them show up. Why didn't a third show up? Right? Or if they're so solitary, how did two show up? I'm not sure how that comes to be, but apparently it's two males and one female. And the males want to impress the female. Right. So they have a race. Okay. And that is the Roomba. They race like physically. Physically race. Yes. And is the I'm just picturing the female being like, like, it's like a drag race. And she's like walking out with her, with her flags and she's like, on the count of three boys. Oh, it's not like it's not like a drag show. No, like a like a drag race. Yeah. And then they're like, so you're not far off, I I guess. The female swims along. The two males chase her and they push, shove, splash each other vine to prove themselves the most dominant. Whichever of the males outmaneuvers, his rival wins the chance to mate with the female, but the female can still say no. So the female is still not feeling it. Then she will, as I said, turn her body to keep her genital slit out of water and prevent copulation. Well, if she's into belly to belly and when the male ejaculates, guess how much sperm is released to fertilize the egg? Two gallons. Like oh, yeah. Like is it? In what form are we talking? Like, what's our form of measurement in liters? Okay, fifty thousand liters, I think twenty liters. Twenty liters that I don't know. I wasn't even looking. I was looking up blue, blue whale sperm, ten, two liters of soda with every I just I was just shaking the show to sort of just they are not monogamous. So the women, when it's when they're ready to mate. Their goal is like mate with as many men as they can during this period to increase their odds of reproducing and keeping the oh, okay going. So this whole thing happens. They may hang out for a couple days and, you know, hook up some more. Yeah, she may move on and find another one. Okay. Okay, girl. Female whales give birth to a single baby calf every two to three years following an eleven month pregnancy, because I think it just takes so much out of them to like to breastfeed and stuff. Well, that too, but like to even just like to grow the the fetus. Oh yeah. Birth the fetus, breastfeed the fetus. It's like such a lot of energy to do that. That's great. Take takes their pink away, you know? Yeah, yeah. So they also have to eat like so much more when they're pregnant. Yeah. And and proceeding like I said, when they go off and they feed to come back to get through this period. So these fetuses. Yeah. How you talked about how big they were. There are a couple of tons. I think there were more than that. Like four tons. The the freshly born infant or. Well, pregnant. Yes. This new little this new little whale comes out tail first. Bigger than an elephant. It comes out tail first, comes out tail first. And they are twenty five feet long and seven thousand pounds. So like three and a half tons. Wow. Heavier than a car. Wow. I mean, these females are BA because there are instances that we know of of the blue whales birthing twins. So can you imagine doing two of these and then having to breastfeed two of these? No. And they breastfeed for like six to seven months or something like that. That's right. Six months. The calves gain. How much weight a day do you think they gain while breastfeeding? Oh my gosh. Pounds a day. The calves gain two hundred pounds a day nursing. Wow. And that that all comes from the whale milk, which is forty percent fat. And then after about six months, when the whale has doubled its length, it leans from its mother and then it just goes off and swims by itself. That's so sad. Swims around for, you know, at least four more years until it reaches sexual maturity. And then it starts this this cycle. But just like, yeah, your six month old, it's like, and off you go. And then that's it. They're by themselves in the ocean. Yeah. That is ninety years. I have a question thinking about. Yeah. Do you think that they recognize their mom? Like, do you think like when they go back to where they're all meeting up, they're like, oh, that's my mom. That would be. Well, they have really good memories, right? So maybe they would know. Do they recognize the sound? Well, they have to know not to birth with their mother, but the women don't really sing. The women could be singing. We just can't pick it up. I mean, the thing is, that is that there's there's so much. Again, we don't even know. So and then I talk about they do interbreed with other whales, particularly fin whales. And they have like tract parentage. So this theory that that you had about not a blue whale, but that the documentary proposed about a whale breed with a different whale and then no one wanting them and them just being isolated sounds like not really true, because while they do interbreed, other whales still breed with them with those offspring. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Blue whales are endangered with only about ten to twenty five thousand alive. Presently, ninety five percent of their population was wiped out by whaling in the nineteen hundreds. And then the other issues we have is, again, we talked about krill. The high CO2 levels are damaging the eggs of the krill. And if the krill dies off, then there's going to be no food source for blue whales. Oh, no. They also get hit with boats sometimes, so that's not good. So humans are kind of their number one risk. Yeah. But do you know why blubber. No, no, it wasn't blubber. It's because they were using their cartilage blue whale cartilage specifically. And like the fashion industry, they were making like corsets and like making the form of the dress of this, like cartilage because it would, like, hold its shape really well. We talk about the boning, the boning of the corset. Yeah. They were taking it and then it was like, what, the eighteen, the nineteen sixties? They banned it. Yeah, but look it up. It's because of the fashion industry. Mhm. Well, other than humans, which are obviously the number one predator and enemy of the blue whale, which animal do you think is their biggest threat? The dolphins. Um, I was thinking something that, like, attaches to them and, like, feeds off them somehow. Well, it is the killer whale. Oh, not allowed to call it that or something. Yeah. So we can't call it the killer whales. Killer whales anymore. We just call them the orcas. Mhm. Yeah. Then the orcas. The orcas. But obviously the orca is dwarfed by the blue whale, but they like to go after the calves. Oh, the killer whales go after the calves, kill off the calves. But also don't. The killer whales aren't they? Aren't they in like packs? Like. Don't they. Aren't they kill in a group? Yeah. Aren't they like, they like attack in a group. Yeah. So yeah, like the dolphins. Right. Like that's what I mean. Like they so it's, you know, there might be way smaller than a blue whale, but there it's ten on one. Yeah. Yeah. Mentioned a previous episode that I saw this like Instagram reel about a whale being tracked and something eating the tracker. And I was like, okay, fact check that. I checked it for myself. Okay. And it was, I was a little bit wrong. Humans have been scooped up by whales. They're not eaten usually. Usually whales spit them out. They don't like them. In twenty twenty five, a kayaker in Chile's Strait of Magellan was briefly engulfed by a humpback whale that was lunging through a school of small fish. Um. But again, he was spit out. He was fine. But that story I was thinking of was actually a shark or something. So anyway, kind of as I touched on, we don't know much more about them because studying them is so hard. They spend most of their lives far from shore. They dive hundreds of feet below the surface, and they travel thousands of miles across open ocean. And we can't really just follow them. So we can't track migrations. We don't really get to observe their behavior. We don't really have a good guess about population sizes. So they just rely on these satellite tags that we track for a couple hours on underwater microphones and drones, and they do little skin biopsies to try to do genetic sampling and track lineage. But again, it's like somewhere between ten thousand and twenty five thousand. That's like quite a amount. We don't even have a good estimate of how many there are. Right. So that is everything I learned. This is what I have thought of number one. I wonder if they'll go extinct during our lifetime. That will be really sad. Again, I think it really isn't going to take. It's really if it's just the krill. Yeah, we probably have the technology to take the krill and like multiply them to keep feeding the blue whales because the blue whales are so endangered. That would be my thought. Well, but the CO2 is killing the eggs. So how are. So you're gonna, like, grow them in a lab and then you're gonna release them? No, I don't think that. I think that would be such a massive quantity. We don't even really know where the whales are. Yeah, you just release it. I thought that would require such a massive amount. I don't think that would happen. I think the numbers have gone up a little bit. So while it was like we had this massive nineteen hundreds again, I said ninety five percent of them were destroyed. They think we're kind of back on the I thought the. Hold on. I thought we were headed towards an ice age. MM. No, I thought the I think we're headed towards the opposite. I don't really understand global warming because global warming can mean it gets colder. Right. Like I don't really understand the earth goes in a warm cold cycle. So even though we're like, it's so hot global warming, we're actually on a cold cycle right now. Right. That's what I meant. Like we're still melting. We're colder right now. So have the icebergs stopped melting? I'm telling you, I feel like I, I heard I heard about this, that we're not as hot over time as we had predicted ourselves to be, or something like that. Anyway, I don't know the answer. It's just it's it's ten percent of the information anyways. Ten percent. Yeah. I don't really understand. This is not our area of expertise. No. Okay. Well, last episode and we're gonna we're gonna take a little summer hiatus, summer vacay. Guys, just a reminder, don't forget to check out our Facebook and Instagram pages at three Scream Queens. That's the number three scream queens. All one word. We're also on Reddit. Same username. If you want to check out our website, go to three scream queens dot com and you can find links to our social media accounts, our buzzsprout page, all of our episodes, additional content, and our contact page where you can engage with us and share any updates on the topics that we have discussed. Let us know how we're doing and what you want to hear next. There are also opportunities to financially support us with links to buy us a cup of coffee and links to our merch store. As always, if you choose not to financially support us, We appreciate the follows, the downloads, the listens, the likes. Okay. What should the people do? 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