Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
Speaker 2: name is Robert.
Speaker 3: Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. So a few weeks back
Speaker 3: on the show, we did a series of episodes on
Speaker 3: the Pacific gray whale. That series was based on some
Speaker 3: actual travels that you and your family did rob with
Speaker 3: where you got to encounter these wonderful beasts up close.
Speaker 3: But ever since then, I've had a bit of a
Speaker 3: low grade whale fever, and so based on maybe not
Speaker 3: physical travels in the world, but literary travels of the mind,
Speaker 3: I've been drawn back to the subject of wales. Today.
Speaker 3: We are returning to talk not about a particular species
Speaker 3: of whale, but about a particular anatomical feature common to wales,
Speaker 3: the respiratory orifice of the cetacean, known as the spout
Speaker 3: or the spiracle, or most commonly today, the blowhole.
Speaker 2: That's right, one of the most famous features of the whale.
Speaker 2: If you know nothing else about the whale, if your
Speaker 2: knowledge of whale anatomy is limited to cartoons and emojis,
Speaker 2: you know something of the spout, you may have the
Speaker 2: wrong idea of what it's all about, and we'll get
Speaker 2: into that in this episode. But you know that whales
Speaker 2: do this right.
Speaker 3: The saying is not thar she filter feeds. The saying
Speaker 3: is thar she blows right now. I actually became interested
Speaker 3: in this subject because I was reading a chapter in
Speaker 3: the great American whale novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville.
Speaker 3: Basic plot summary. A wandering young man named Ishmael and
Speaker 3: his new companion quek weig enlist on a whale ship
Speaker 3: captained by a man named Ahab, who is on a
Speaker 3: revenge quest against a sperm whale that previously removed his leg.
Speaker 2: A classic tale. Even if you're not familiar with the
Speaker 2: with the book itself, you've probably seen one of the
Speaker 2: many film adaptations over the years.
Speaker 3: Yes, though, you know if you just watch a movie,
Speaker 3: there is a quality to the text of Moby Dick
Speaker 3: that probably won't quite come across because this is not
Speaker 3: a strictly plot oriented story. It's not a novel where
Speaker 3: the action of the plot always just kind of proceeds
Speaker 3: ahead at a predictable pace. Many chapters of this book
Speaker 3: are more like self contained informational or meditational essays on
Speaker 3: subjects of all kinds. So there are little There are
Speaker 3: chapters that are essays about the tackle and equipment of
Speaker 3: whaling vessels, the monkey rope, the harpoon that you know,
Speaker 3: all the different things. There are chapters about the accuracy
Speaker 3: or relative lack thereof, of whale illustrations in books. There's
Speaker 3: a chapter about clam chowder. There are chapters about way heads.
Speaker 3: There's one chapter where he does phrenology on a whale head.
Speaker 3: There are chapters about whale skin, whale tails, et cetera. Now,
Speaker 3: when it comes to the quote seatology of Moby Dick,
Speaker 3: it seems to be Melville is all over the place,
Speaker 3: sourcing his information in some cases from published works of
Speaker 3: naturalists of his day, which was, of course, of you know,
Speaker 3: we would judge, by the scientific standards of today, of
Speaker 3: mixed quality to begin with. And in other cases he
Speaker 3: seems to be relying on kind of the trade knowledge
Speaker 3: of sailors and whalemen. Some of his biological observations I
Speaker 3: think seem fairly keen, and others are bizarre or downright implausible.
Speaker 3: A very commonly cited example, though I don't know if
Speaker 3: this represents the personal belief of Melville of the author
Speaker 3: the narrator, Ishmael is firmly committed to the claim that
Speaker 3: whales are fish. They are not, They're mammals. In fact,
Speaker 3: I was reading about this in a paper called Herman
Speaker 3: Melville Marine Biologist, by Harold Morowitz, published in The Biological
Speaker 3: Bulletin in twenty eleven about the idea that whales are mammals.
Speaker 3: Morowitz rights, quote this was not a new finding. Aristotle
Speaker 3: in History of Animals some twenty two hundred years earlier. Oh, actually,
Speaker 3: he's saying earlier than Linnaeus had noticed the difference between
Speaker 3: members of the whales and porpoises and other marine inhabitants
Speaker 3: the fish. He based this distinction on the cetaceans having
Speaker 3: the mammalian properties of being warm blooded, breathing air through lungs,
Speaker 3: and feeding the young through memory glands. Melville, though through
Speaker 3: his spokesman Ishmael, strongly disagreed and was willing to place
Speaker 3: the anecdotal knowledge of a seaman against the formal knowledge
Speaker 3: of academics. He insists that a whale is quote a
Speaker 3: spouting fish with a horizontal tail.
Speaker 2: Well, I guess this kind of falls under the whole
Speaker 2: semen versus landsman sort of thing, right, like woad Aristotle, No,
Speaker 2: never served on a whaling vessel.
Speaker 3: That's right. This kind of came up in our Grey
Speaker 3: Whale series two. What was the context? So was it
Speaker 3: arguments about how aggressive actually the gray whale is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you go by the accounts of whalers who
Speaker 2: did get to you know, throw in their their, their, their,
Speaker 2: their two cents and name various things about whales as well. Yeah,
Speaker 2: according to them, the gray whale is just an absolute monster,
Speaker 2: you know, that will just absolutely destroy anything in its path,
Speaker 2: which it's certainly capable of, as we discuss if it
Speaker 2: has been provoked, but if it's not provoked, it as
Speaker 2: a very peaceful and curious creature. Right.
Speaker 3: So anyway, the narrator Ishmael's claims about whales, while in
Speaker 3: my opinion always fascinating, are a mixed bag of some
Speaker 3: sharp observations, some weird untruths, as well as ambiguous claims
Speaker 3: somewhere in the middle. And I came across a number
Speaker 3: of all of the above recently in chapter eighty five
Speaker 3: of this book, which is called the Fountain. This chapter
Speaker 3: is a consideration of the blowhole of the whale and
Speaker 3: the towering exhalations from it, which, by the way, are
Speaker 3: of great significance to whalers, because the spoutings of the
Speaker 3: blowhole are what whalers use to cite the whales out
Speaker 3: on the open sea and track them down.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the varsy blows, right. I love that this
Speaker 2: chapter is called the Fountain because, as we'll discuss, like
Speaker 2: even the title of this chapter is deceptive.
Speaker 3: Right, So Rob, if you don't mind, I'm gonna I'm
Speaker 3: gonna set the themes here by reading the first couple
Speaker 3: of paragraphs of this chapter excellently.
Speaker 2: Are you gonna use the sailor voice from that?
Speaker 3: I'm not gonna do pirate voice. Okay, I'm not strong enough. Okay.
Speaker 3: So this is from Moby Dick by Herman Melville, the
Speaker 3: chapter The Fountain that for six thousand years, and no
Speaker 3: one knows how many millions of ages before, the great
Speaker 3: whales should have been spouting all over the sea and
Speaker 3: sprinkling and mystifying the gardens of the deep, as with
Speaker 3: so many sprinkling or mystifying pots, And that for some
Speaker 3: centuries back, thousands of hunters should have been close by
Speaker 3: the fountain of the Whale, watching these sprinklings and spoutings,
Speaker 3: that all this should be. And yet that down to
Speaker 3: this blessed minute fifteen and a quarter minutes past one
Speaker 3: o'clock pm on this sixteenth day of December eighty eighteen
Speaker 3: fifty one, it should still remain a problem whether these
Speaker 3: spoutings are after all really water or nothing but vapor.
Speaker 3: This is surely a noteworthy thing. And then, skipping a
Speaker 3: bit into the next paragraph, everyone knows that, by the
Speaker 3: peculiar cunning of their gills, the finny tribes in general
Speaker 3: breathe the air, which at all times is combined with
Speaker 3: the element in which they swim. Hence, a herring or
Speaker 3: a cod might live a century and never once raise
Speaker 3: its head above the surface. But owing to his marked
Speaker 3: internal sar structure, which gives him regular lungs like a
Speaker 3: human being's, the whale can only live by inhaling the
Speaker 3: disengaged air in the open atmosphere, wherefore the necessity for
Speaker 3: his periodical visits to the upper world. But he cannot
Speaker 3: in any degree breathe through his mouth, for in his
Speaker 3: ordinary attitude, the sperm whale's mouth is buried at least
Speaker 3: eight feet beneath the surface. And what is still more,
Speaker 3: his windpipe has no connection with his mouth. No, he
Speaker 3: breathes through his spiracle alone, and this is on the
Speaker 3: top of his head.
Speaker 2: Now, so far, so good. I mean, nothing too out
Speaker 2: of whack and all that, I think.
Speaker 3: Oh sure, And I think this does help give you
Speaker 3: a sense of some of the wide eyed admiration and
Speaker 3: the power of the mystery in describing whales at this
Speaker 3: time when, like documentary footage was not a thing that
Speaker 3: existed yet. You know, people couldn't like see planet Earth
Speaker 3: and see what whales looked like. So you know, most
Speaker 3: people probably never would have seen any whale in person.
Speaker 3: Even if you had, you probably would have only seen them,
Speaker 3: you know, breaching the surface occasionally or spouting from below.
Speaker 3: Like you wouldn't have the kind of familiarity with whales
Speaker 3: that even the average person has today just through being
Speaker 3: able to see them in movies and documentaries.
Speaker 2: Right, And of course, depending on when you're trying, you're
Speaker 2: looking out to the ocean and potentially seeing a whale,
Speaker 2: that their ability to see them might be greatly reduced
Speaker 2: by human whaling enterprise, which you know certainly initially greatly
Speaker 2: reduced the number of whales that would have been close
Speaker 2: to shore and then eventually got into those populations that
Speaker 2: were further from shore.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Now, so this chapter on the fountain, on one hand,
Speaker 3: it simply made me want to investigate the blowhole and
Speaker 3: whale respiration as a subject in itself, which we will do.
Speaker 3: But this chapter also raises a number of controversies and
Speaker 3: Strange claims that I wanted to further investigate. One of
Speaker 3: the controversies that Melville opens the chapter by acknowledging is
Speaker 3: the question of what is the spout or what is
Speaker 3: it that comes out of the spout? I guess it
Speaker 3: depends on what you're using the word spout to refer
Speaker 3: to there. But yet, what is coming out of the blowhole?
Speaker 3: Is it water or is it, as Ishmael says, quote,
Speaker 3: nothing but vapor. That's a question that did seem to
Speaker 3: be a live one to some degree in Melville's day.
Speaker 3: But also as far as Strange claims go, here's one
Speaker 3: for you I want to read from later in the chapter.
Speaker 2: Are you ready, Rob, Yes, let's have it.
Speaker 3: Okay, so he says, quote, nor is it at all
Speaker 3: prudent for the hunter to be over curious touching the
Speaker 3: precise nature of the whale spout? It will not do
Speaker 3: for him to be peering into it and putting his
Speaker 3: face in it. You cannot go with your pitcher to
Speaker 3: this fountain and fill it and bring it away, For
Speaker 3: even when coming into slight contact with the outer vapory
Speaker 3: shreds of the jet, which will often happen, your skin
Speaker 3: will feverishly smart the acridness of the thing so touching it.
Speaker 3: And I know one who coming into still closer contact
Speaker 3: with the spout, whether with some scientific object in view
Speaker 3: or otherwise, I cannot say, the skin peeled off from
Speaker 3: his cheek and arm. Wherefore, among Whalemen the spout is
Speaker 3: deemed poisonous. They try to evade it. Another thing I
Speaker 3: have heard it said, and I do not much doubt
Speaker 3: it that if the jet is fairly spouted into your eyes,
Speaker 3: it will blind you. The wisest thing the investigator can do, then,
Speaker 3: it seems to me, is to let this deadly spout alone. Okay,
Speaker 3: So I read that, and I was like, what is
Speaker 3: going on here? This sounds wrong to me. But I
Speaker 3: wonder if there's some kind of basis to it, or
Speaker 3: some way this rumor could have gotten started that would
Speaker 3: be identifiable. I don't know. So that's another thing I
Speaker 3: want to explore. The allegedly deadly, poisonous blinding spout steals
Speaker 3: your power of sight, melts away your flesh like xenomorph blood.
Speaker 2: This is something else. This goes beyond discussions of water
Speaker 2: versus mists, because this is just not true. You know,
Speaker 2: we mentioned my time with my family down in Mexico
Speaker 2: getting to observe the gray whales. So when we were
Speaker 2: out there, there would often be multiple gray whales around
Speaker 2: the boat constantly, you know, breathing close to the surface.
Speaker 2: And I should point out these were casual breaths. These
Speaker 2: were not breaths that were occurring after deep dive or
Speaker 2: anything like that, but still pretty explosive exhalations, a lot
Speaker 2: of mist floating around in the air. I definitely got
Speaker 2: whale spout on me from these mists, and I saw
Speaker 2: on more than one occasion somebody take a rather stiff
Speaker 2: blast of the whale spout directly in the face. Now
Speaker 2: I don't recall if they had sunglasses on or what,
Speaker 2: but it was it was alarming, but it wasn't anything
Speaker 2: that caused undue grief or stress. It was one of
Speaker 2: those things you kind of laugh about afterwards. You wash
Speaker 2: off your face. And some of my fellow whale watchers,
Speaker 2: they really took it as kind of a point of pride,
Speaker 2: you know, they're like, they referred to it as a
Speaker 2: kind of baptism. You know, you're just, hey, you wanted
Speaker 2: to get close to these creatures. It doesn't get a
Speaker 2: lot closer than that.
Speaker 3: But what about your skin? Did it peel off or
Speaker 3: do you still have your skin on?
Speaker 2: I still have all, I mean all my skin was
Speaker 2: intact following each of these episodes out on the water.
Speaker 2: People who were blasted full on in the face also
Speaker 2: were fine. So yeah, I mean, the only thing that
Speaker 2: comes to mind is, I guess it seems possible that
Speaker 2: someone could have in some sort of an allergic reaction
Speaker 2: to something in the whale spout, but I've never heard
Speaker 2: this is actually occurring.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it seems to be based on everything I've read
Speaker 3: that You're right, I could not find any evidence that
Speaker 3: what comes out of a whales blowhole is actually poisonous
Speaker 3: or acrid to the point that it will will burn
Speaker 3: your skin away. But we can still come back to this,
Speaker 3: and I don't know, maybe at least try to investigate
Speaker 3: anything we can figure out about the claim itself, despite
Speaker 3: the fact that it seems obviously not true.
Speaker 2: Right, Let's get into the basic science of whale spout
Speaker 2: or whale blow. What is whale blow well? Its discussed
Speaker 2: by Mark Carwadine in The Handbook of Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises,
Speaker 2: an excellent book that I referred to several times in
Speaker 2: our previous series on the gray whale. Whale blow or
Speaker 2: whale spout refers to both the whales act of breathing
Speaker 2: explosive exhalation followed by immediate inhalation, and also it refers
Speaker 2: to the visible misty cloud that hangs in the air
Speaker 2: afterwards quote condensed water, a fine spray of mucus from
Speaker 2: inside the lungs, and seawater trapped in the blowholes. And
Speaker 2: I think this was one of the main reasons that
Speaker 2: I did take a little extra care to avoid staring
Speaker 2: down over the side of the boat at a blowhole,
Speaker 2: because I did not want to be sneezed full on
Speaker 2: in the face by one of these these leviathans. But
Speaker 2: I was not deathly afraid of it, and I'm fearful
Speaker 2: of my sight.
Speaker 3: Well sure, and you might want to avoid that, not
Speaker 3: just because of the forcefulness of the blow. But for
Speaker 3: another I mean one of the same reasons you wouldn't
Speaker 3: want a human to sneeze in your face, which is
Speaker 3: that like when somebody sneezes, that mucus might contain significant
Speaker 3: loading of bacteria, and yeah, you don't know what that's
Speaker 3: going to be.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, so I avoided it, but I also didn't
Speaker 2: feel bad about I certainly got plenty of the mist
Speaker 2: on me, because if you have multiple gray whales in
Speaker 2: your vicinity, you're just in a cloud of the stuff.
Speaker 2: So it's unavoidable. Yeah, so, you know, breaking it down
Speaker 2: to brass tax here the obvious whales. Of course, as
Speaker 2: we've stated aquatic mammals, they have to come to the
Speaker 2: surface to breathe, but hold their breath while underwater, and
Speaker 2: according to Hammond at All in the book Whales Their
Speaker 2: Biology and Behavior, whales consciously can they're breathing, unlike most mammals,
Speaker 2: who are reflex breathers like us. They breathe through their blowholes,
Speaker 2: which are sometimes called their nares, which are essentially evolved
Speaker 2: nostrils which can be muscularly opened and closed, and as
Speaker 2: the authors point out, quote the air pressure in the
Speaker 2: nasal passage is higher than the ambient pressure at the surface,
Speaker 2: leading to the explosive release of air from the blowhole.
Speaker 2: The exhaled air from the whales inside is warmer than
Speaker 2: the surrounding air and carries moisture, which condenses into the
Speaker 2: visible blow that so often is the first tell tale
Speaker 2: sign of a whale. Now, as we've discussed in the
Speaker 2: show before, baileen whales have two holes, while toothed whales
Speaker 2: have only one. Baileane whales also have a raised blowhole
Speaker 2: with a frontal splash guard. It's the explosive exhalation and
Speaker 2: quick inhalation takes a mere second in the smaller whales
Speaker 2: in just a few seconds in the giant. So there's
Speaker 2: a real economy of breathing in all of this. You know,
Speaker 2: you come up to the surface, and contrary to a
Speaker 2: lot of the he illustrations of whales, their whole head
Speaker 2: does not come up. I mean, they can do some
Speaker 2: of this, but it's not necessary for breathing. All they
Speaker 2: have to do is just get the top of their
Speaker 2: head that little blowhole above the water. To pull this
Speaker 2: off in a manner of seconds and according to the
Speaker 2: National Marine Life Center, just one exhalation pretty much empties
Speaker 2: of whale's entire lungs. One of our exhalations only empties
Speaker 2: part of our lungs.
Speaker 3: Now, this is an interesting fact that I thought was
Speaker 3: worth looking at a little bit deeper, this thing about
Speaker 3: whale lungs and capacity and the extent to which that
Speaker 3: capacity is used. So I started thinking about the comparison
Speaker 3: to underwater breath holding in humans. Most people who have
Speaker 3: no special training can comfortably hold their breath underwater for
Speaker 3: about a minute. I've seen estimates ranging from like one
Speaker 3: to two minutes to thirty to ninety seconds. I don't
Speaker 3: know if that depends on how old the population you're
Speaker 3: looking at is, or you know, how physically fit they are,
Speaker 3: but still, you know, the average person is not going
Speaker 3: to be able to stay under that long, maybe a
Speaker 3: couple minutes. Now, with conditioning, humans can stay under water
Speaker 3: a lot longer. I was actually I was trying to
Speaker 3: find the current human record for underwater breath holding, and
Speaker 3: according to Guinness World Records, the record holder is a
Speaker 3: Croatian man named Budimir Shobot, who on March twenty seventh,
Speaker 3: twenty twenty one, stayed underwater for twenty four minutes and
Speaker 3: thirty seven seconds, and at first I was like, wait
Speaker 3: a second, that just cannot be correct. That is too long.
Speaker 3: That is more than two full playthroughs of the album
Speaker 3: length version, not the single version of I'd Do Anything
Speaker 3: for Love, but I won't do that. Can't imagine it.
Speaker 3: And to some degree my instincts were confirmed because I
Speaker 3: realized there's a big caveat here Showbot's record and many
Speaker 3: other people who compete for this particular record. This was
Speaker 3: for a special category of breath holding, oxygen assisted voluntary
Speaker 3: breath holding. So in this category, before you go under
Speaker 3: the water, you can spend up to thirty minutes ventilating
Speaker 3: with one hundred percent pure oxygen from a tank. So
Speaker 3: this is a pre dive hyper ventilation process to like
Speaker 3: superoxygenate your body. Of course, one hundred percent pure oxygen's
Speaker 3: much higher than the content in the air. We normally
Speaker 3: breathe at twenty one percent oxygen. So yeah, the people
Speaker 3: who do this, they are super oxygenating their body before
Speaker 3: they start. And also, of course this guy was highly trained.
Speaker 3: He spent more than three years training six days a week.
Speaker 3: So twenty four and a half minutes is the record
Speaker 3: for this technology assisted hyper ventilation category. But I was
Speaker 3: trying to find the not technology assisted version, and I
Speaker 3: found a twenty twenty three article by a University of
Speaker 3: Windsor kinesio pologist named Anthony Bain, and he writes that
Speaker 3: the record for breath holding if you don't pregame with
Speaker 3: pure oxygen, is less than half that. It is possibly
Speaker 3: eleven minutes and thirty five seconds for men, which is
Speaker 3: a record held by Stefan Mifsud. Though there's some dispute
Speaker 3: about this one because there's also a guy named Bronco
Speaker 3: Petrovitch who holds a record accredited by Guinness but not
Speaker 3: by this other organization, a governing body called the International
Speaker 3: Association for the Development of Apnea, which apparently does some
Speaker 3: kind of certification of these records. And I don't want
Speaker 3: to get drawn into a knife fight about which record
Speaker 3: is legitimate, but let's just say the unassisted record for
Speaker 3: men is somewhere between the eleven to twelve minute range,
Speaker 3: and the record for women is nine minutes and two seconds,
Speaker 3: held by Natalia Mulkanova.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we don't want to make any enemies of people
Speaker 2: who can hold their breath this long.
Speaker 3: That does sound dangerous, just as a side note speaking
Speaker 3: of people who can hold their breath shockingly long time.
Speaker 3: This article also mentioned something I hadn't heard of at all,
Speaker 3: Apparently in preparation for the filming of Avatar Too, The
Speaker 3: Way of Water. The actress Kate Winslet trained in underwater
Speaker 3: breath holding for several weeks, and on set she was
Speaker 3: able to stay underwater for more than seven minutes, something
Speaker 3: that I am sure, no matter how much I trained,
Speaker 3: I could not do. She did this on camera too,
Speaker 3: and you can watch a video of it. When she
Speaker 3: pops up at the end, she asks, am I dead?
Speaker 3: So hats off to Kate.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: By the way, did you see Way of Water? I
Speaker 3: haven't seen it yet.
Speaker 2: I did. Yeah, My family and I just doing the holidays.
Speaker 2: It was super cold. One morning we got up and
Speaker 2: saw a morning showing of Avatar two, complete with coffee
Speaker 2: and multiple bathroom breaks because it's super long. But yeah,
Speaker 2: it's fun and it's got space whales in it, so
Speaker 2: that's kind of neat. You know.
Speaker 3: There are some whales that can stay underwater without breathing
Speaker 3: longer than we can go in a movie without a
Speaker 3: bathroom break at least finish coffee involved, Yes, but While
Speaker 3: that is individual records, there are also there are whole
Speaker 3: cultures of people who regularly do extended underwater free diving
Speaker 3: and standard for a long period of time. I was
Speaker 3: looking at one study quickly just to mention by Ilardo
Speaker 3: at All published in the journal Cell in twenty eighteen
Speaker 3: called Physiological and Genetic Adaptations to Diving in Sea Nomads.
Speaker 3: And this study was examining adaptations in the Sama people
Speaker 3: also known as the Bajoo, a nomadic sea living people
Speaker 3: of Southeast Asia who are well known for their amazing
Speaker 3: free diving skills. In some cases they spend several hours
Speaker 3: a day underwater, not continuously, but they will stay under
Speaker 3: continuously for minutes at a time while free diving to
Speaker 3: retrieve things from below. And this is part of been
Speaker 3: part of their culture for thousands of years. And so
Speaker 3: this study did some genomic and anatomical analysis of these
Speaker 3: people to say, well, you know, the free diving skill
Speaker 3: is common in their culture, do they typically have any
Speaker 3: differences that assist in that? And the study did find
Speaker 3: quote using a comparative genomic study, we showed that natural
Speaker 3: selection on genetic variants in the PDE one zero a
Speaker 3: gene have increased spleen size in the bajow, providing them
Speaker 3: with a larger reservoir of oxygenated red blood cells. We
Speaker 3: also find evidence of strong selections specific to the bajow
Speaker 3: on bdk RB two, a gene affecting the human diving reflex.
Speaker 3: And so they say that people living in this culture
Speaker 3: have developed specific adaptations for hypoxia tolerance, for being better
Speaker 3: at going longer with holding their breath underwater. But anyway
Speaker 3: to come back to this sort of untrained natural human
Speaker 3: range of peace, people who don't practice diving commonly, you know,
Speaker 3: it's maybe like one to two minutes on average, more
Speaker 3: like nine to twelve minutes at the extreme. Some whale species,
Speaker 3: on the other hand, have, in extreme cases, as we said,
Speaker 3: been observed to stay under the surface for hours. And
Speaker 3: while that might not be normal, it's normal for whales
Speaker 3: to stand er for longer than the unassisted record for humans.
Speaker 3: It's commonly cited that sperm whales can stay under for
Speaker 3: ninety minutes while hunting. So the question is how do
Speaker 3: they do this? You might naturally assume the answer is
Speaker 3: that the whales have bigger lungs, they can take a
Speaker 3: deeper breath hold in more air because they've got bigger lungs.
Speaker 3: But actually that's not the case. The strange thing is,
Speaker 3: relative to body size, whales have significantly smaller lungs than humans.
Speaker 3: Human lungs are roughly seven percent of body size on average,
Speaker 3: but whale lungs can be less than half that, at
Speaker 3: about three percent of body size.
Speaker 2: That's fast, that's a great point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So how does that worry the standard for like
Speaker 3: movie length times while having lungs that are relatively smaller
Speaker 3: than ours. So I was reading about this in a
Speaker 3: book called The Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals edited by burned
Speaker 3: In Puran from Academic Press two thousand and nine, and
Speaker 3: there was a chapter on breathing in marine mammals by
Speaker 3: the marine biologist Douglas Wartsock. And here's where we come
Speaker 3: back to what you said, Rob about the relative difference
Speaker 3: in how much the lung can empty. This concerns a
Speaker 3: biological metric known as the tidal volume. Tidal volume is
Speaker 3: the amount of air that is inhaled and exhaled during
Speaker 3: normal respiration. It turns out most animals do not completely
Speaker 3: empty and refill their lungs with each breath. Instead, they're
Speaker 3: always exchanging some fractional percentage of the gas in their
Speaker 3: lungs fresh air from the outside. What percentage of the
Speaker 3: total lung capacity is exchanged with each breath varies by species,
Speaker 3: and I guess probably also would vary with individual animals too,
Speaker 3: but there are certainly species differences and there are trends
Speaker 3: with groups of animals. According to Wartsock, the tidal volume
Speaker 3: is a bigger percentage of the animal's total lung capacity
Speaker 3: when you're looking at marine mammals than when you're looking
Speaker 3: at terrestrial mammals. So you look at an average terrestrial mammal, horses, humans,
Speaker 3: whatever tidal volume is going to be something like ten
Speaker 3: to fifteen percent of total lung capacity. Meanwhile, for marine mammals,
Speaker 3: and this would include not just whales, but other marine mammals,
Speaker 3: pinnipeds and so forth, average tidal volume is much higher,
Speaker 3: usually more than seventy five percent of total lung capacity,
Speaker 3: so many multiples beyond the depth of gas exchange that
Speaker 3: we accomplish when we breathe. For sea mammals like whales,
Speaker 3: breathing in and out is just a more dramatic activity.
Speaker 3: They're emptying and refilling to a near total extent, and
Speaker 3: that's just for normal respiration. For what works out calls
Speaker 3: vital capacity essentially the maximum title volume you're capable of
Speaker 3: when you're like really breathing in and out as deeply
Speaker 3: as you can. That rarely exceeds seventy five percent of
Speaker 3: lung capacity in land based mammals, but marine mammals can
Speaker 3: go higher than ninety percent. So even though again whales
Speaker 3: might have smaller lungs relative to body size, they can
Speaker 3: like almost totally collapse that lung to exhale and then
Speaker 3: reinflate the lung totally, like huge exchange of gas. And
Speaker 3: the question would be what makes that difference? Why would
Speaker 3: marine mammals have the ability to sort of crush out
Speaker 3: their lungs like that. Well, we can't really do the
Speaker 3: same thing, Wortok says, quote. Marine mammal lungs contain more
Speaker 3: elastic tissue than those of terrestrial mammals. The ribs contain
Speaker 3: more cartilage and are thus more compliant than those of
Speaker 3: terrestrial mammals. The lung is also more compliant. Marine mammal
Speaker 3: lungs can collapse and reinflate repeatedly, whereas in terrestrial mammals,
Speaker 3: lung collapse is a serious situation that requires intervention to reinflate,
Speaker 3: although both terrestrial mammals and marine mammals inspire actively and
Speaker 3: expire passively, so there's active working of a muscle to
Speaker 3: breathe in and then relaxing of the muscle to breathe out. Quote.
Speaker 3: The features noted earlier allow much greater elastic recoil of
Speaker 3: the lungs chest, cavity, and diaphragm, and thus a greater
Speaker 3: tidal volume in proportion to total lung capacity. So he's
Speaker 3: almost painting a picture of whale lungs as this kind
Speaker 3: of I don't know, like super elastica balloon or is
Speaker 3: something that just kind of like springs back and forth.
Speaker 3: And I know this isn't biologically accurate, but to my mind,
Speaker 3: I was thinking about with this like, you know, naturally
Speaker 3: collapsing lung that's just part of the breathing process. It's
Speaker 3: almost in my brain like a whoope cushion being sat
Speaker 3: on every time the whale breathes out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean all of this. I think it brings
Speaker 2: up something that is at once obvious about the whale
Speaker 2: and also you know, a lot more sublime in many
Speaker 2: ways as well. And that is of course that when
Speaker 2: you look back at what whales may have looked like,
Speaker 2: what their bodies may have been like when they were
Speaker 2: land based organisms or their ancestors were, and you look
Speaker 2: at their forms now, it's like they have changed so much,
Speaker 2: they have evolved so much to become these masters of
Speaker 2: the ocean, and there are all these various features like
Speaker 2: this where it's just it's just absolutely alarming when you
Speaker 2: look closer, even though I mean very obviously this is
Speaker 2: the nature of the whale when you just look at
Speaker 2: even just a basic sketch of their anatomy.
Speaker 3: Yes, absolutely, I mean this once eons ago quadrupedal mammal
Speaker 3: that lived an ever increasing amount of its life in
Speaker 3: the water and eventually became a fully marine organism. And
Speaker 3: now one of its adaptations is that its lungs almost
Speaker 3: completely collapse when it breeds out and create this forceful
Speaker 3: burst of exhalation that is, in the end, what we
Speaker 3: see when the whale, when the whale spouts or when
Speaker 3: the blowhole opens, and it can be incredibly powerful when
Speaker 3: the lung collapses. Wartsock writes, quote in gray whale calves
Speaker 3: the duration of expiration and inhalation is closer to half
Speaker 3: a second, but the tidal volume can be as great
Speaker 3: as sixty two leaders, and the maximum flow rate is
Speaker 3: as great as two hundred and two leaders per second.
Speaker 3: Gas flows through the external nares at speeds of forty
Speaker 3: four meters per second during inspiration and two hundred meters
Speaker 3: percent second during expiration, and that also he emphasizes how
Speaker 3: efficient the breathing process is, saying that, like the breathing
Speaker 3: out usually begins before the whale actually even breaks the
Speaker 3: surface of the water, so it's like they're coming up
Speaker 3: to break the surface, and then before they reach the surface,
Speaker 3: the exhale starts, so it blasts, and then that might
Speaker 3: create some of the water you actually see. Another part
Speaker 3: of what appears to be water coming out of the
Speaker 3: blowhole is the condensing of the of the vapor from
Speaker 3: the lungs. But then it's over the surface for just
Speaker 3: a little bit of time. It uses that time while
Speaker 3: it's out to breathe in suddenly and then it goes
Speaker 3: back under.
Speaker 2: Yeah. In my experiences out there with the gray whales too,
Speaker 2: the Yeah, it's depending on when they're releasing their exhalation.
Speaker 2: If they're releasing it when the blowhole is above or
Speaker 2: mostly above the surface of the water. That creates one
Speaker 2: type of spout. But if they release it underneath the
Speaker 2: water by even say, you know, a few inches or more,
Speaker 2: you're going to have even more water coming up. It's
Speaker 2: going to be even more of a of what feels
Speaker 2: like a fountain to the face or to the side
Speaker 2: of the boat.
Speaker 3: Now, one last thing I wanted to mention about why
Speaker 3: whales can stay under so long. Actually first came across
Speaker 3: this and just an interesting informational video by a marine
Speaker 3: ecologist at the University of New South Wales named Professor
Speaker 3: Tracy Rogers, and this was pointing out, in addition to
Speaker 3: stuff about the lungs, the capacity of cetaceans to just
Speaker 3: store more oxygen in their body tissues. So beyond what
Speaker 3: gas the lungs are capable of holding the storage of
Speaker 3: oxygen in the hemoglobin and red blood cells. You know,
Speaker 3: both humans and whales marine mammals. In terrestrial mammals store
Speaker 3: oxygen in the hemoglobin, but whales have much more hemoglobin
Speaker 3: in their blood, which is one reason that their blood
Speaker 3: might appear darker red than the blood of terrestrial mammals.
Speaker 3: I don't know if you've ever seen whale blood, but
Speaker 3: I feel like I have noticed this before that it
Speaker 3: comes out so dark red it almost looks kind of
Speaker 3: like black or purple.
Speaker 2: I suppose I've seen it in documentaries.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, But also whales simply have more blood relative
Speaker 3: to their body size than terrestrial mammals generally do, and
Speaker 3: they have more myoglobin in their muscles to store oxygen,
Speaker 3: as well as other adaptations that just have to do
Speaker 3: with how the body of the whale uses oxygen once
Speaker 3: it is submerged, So it has adaptations that can, say,
Speaker 3: turn off delivery of oxygen to certain body systems that
Speaker 3: are not necessarily being used at the moment while the
Speaker 3: whale is deeply submerged. So if it's a deep underwater
Speaker 3: hunting and it's not going to come up for a while,
Speaker 3: it might sort of reduce oxygen usage of its digestive
Speaker 3: system or something like that.
Speaker 2: Now we've discussed how the ancestors of whales had frontal
Speaker 2: nostrils at the ends of their snouts before on the show,
Speaker 2: and how the nostrils travel up to the top of
Speaker 2: the head over the course of their evolution, becoming the blowhole.
Speaker 2: We can see evidence of this journey in fossil remains,
Speaker 2: and we can also see this movement in their fetal development.
Speaker 2: We can watch the blowhole move up the face and head,
Speaker 2: and I believe we mostly discuss the energy efficiency of
Speaker 2: a snout breather having to bring the whole head up
Speaker 2: as opposed to the top of the head, and Hammond
Speaker 2: at All also point out that this positioning definitely shades
Speaker 2: down the breathing time over the course of evolution. So
Speaker 2: all they have to do, they don't have to bring
Speaker 2: the snout up to breathe. All they have to do
Speaker 2: is just get the blowhole itself above the surface of
Speaker 2: the water. And like we've been saying in so many changes,
Speaker 2: I mean, the whale is a creature that has just
Speaker 2: been completely transformed by its journey into and its mastery
Speaker 2: of the ocean over the course of its evolution. And
Speaker 2: you can there's so many examples of this, but one
Speaker 2: that came up is this that they have no facial sinuses,
Speaker 2: presumably to avoid complications with diving. Anyone out there if
Speaker 2: you're a diver, and you may know that some of
Speaker 2: the complications that can occur if you're say clogged your
Speaker 2: sinuses are clogged up or something like that. Even if
Speaker 2: you're flying, you can sometimes encounter problems with this, and
Speaker 2: so this is this is just one problem that the
Speaker 2: whale has eliminated through its evolution. Now, coming back to
Speaker 2: the visible spout of the whale, the blow of the whale,
Speaker 2: as one would see from a distance that archually blows.
Speaker 2: It's it's worth noting that it's this is something that
Speaker 2: Mark Carbadine discusses in Hambook of Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises.
Speaker 2: The blow or the spout of a whale is very
Speaker 2: distinctive with larger whales, and it can be categorized by height, shape,
Speaker 2: and visibility. And that's not to say it's easy to do.
Speaker 2: There's an art to it. An experienced whale watcher has
Speaker 2: to take into account various factors such as wind, rain,
Speaker 2: air temperature, light quality, which can all of these can
Speaker 2: you distort the shape of the spout or the degree
Speaker 2: to which the spout is visible. And also we have
Speaker 2: to take into account that the first spout after a
Speaker 2: long dive tends to be far stronger, which I think
Speaker 2: we can sort of relate to that. I mean, that's
Speaker 2: kind of our experience of breathing after holding one's breath
Speaker 2: for a period of time. Also, individual whale size is
Speaker 2: going to play a role in all this, and also
Speaker 2: behavior of an individual whale will also be a factor. Still,
Speaker 2: if you know what you're doing, you can make out
Speaker 2: the species of a great whale, especially at a distance.
Speaker 2: To give a few basic examples of note, here and Joe,
Speaker 2: I sent you some snapshot of some of the illustrations
Speaker 2: from Carlodine's book to look at in your email. There.
Speaker 2: But the gray whale, which we discussed in previous episodes
Speaker 2: is known for its heart shaped plume up to five meters.
Speaker 2: The sperm whale is also known for its spout. It
Speaker 2: has a single blowhole spout off to the side up
Speaker 2: to six meters. The blue whale spout is a single
Speaker 2: vertical plume of up to twelve meters. Then the North
Speaker 2: Atlantic right whale is interesting. Like other right whales, it
Speaker 2: has two spouts, one off to either side up to
Speaker 2: seven meters. And then with the orca, which of course
Speaker 2: we discussed at length in our gray whale series, up
Speaker 2: to five meters, bushy at the top and projected slightly forward.
Speaker 3: Yeah, these illustrations are lovely and they do almost kind
Speaker 3: of look like a silhouettes of different tree species that
Speaker 3: you would identify like that, you know, oh, that's the
Speaker 3: maple and that's the spruce right right.
Speaker 2: So any book you have, particular and in particular the
Speaker 2: Handbook of Whales, Dolphins and Porposes, Yeah, it has pages
Speaker 2: of these where you can compare them. But then also
Speaker 2: each species profiled in the book, they have this image
Speaker 2: of what it's spout would basically look like. Again, you'd
Speaker 2: have to take into account some of these factors though.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, on that note, we're going to go
Speaker 2: ahead and close out this episode, but we'll be back
Speaker 2: for a part two on all of this. I believe
Speaker 2: this will be a two parter, so come back on Thursday.
Speaker 2: We have more to discuss more on this whole idea
Speaker 2: that the Herman Melville's talking about, that a whale spout
Speaker 2: is going to burn your skin off, poison you, and
Speaker 2: blind you. We'll see what some contemporary critics we're saying
Speaker 2: about all of that, and we'll get into some other
Speaker 2: areas surrounding whale spout. In the meantime, if you would
Speaker 2: like to check out other episodes of stuff to blow
Speaker 2: your mind, including checking out that multi part series we
Speaker 2: did on the Gray Whale and it's travels its relationship
Speaker 2: with the Orcas. You can find that in the Stuff
Speaker 2: to Blow Your Mind podcast. Feed core episodes on Tuesdays
Speaker 2: and Thursdays. On Mondays we do a listener mail, on
Speaker 2: Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster fact,
Speaker 2: and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to
Speaker 2: just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you
Speaker 3: would like to get in touch with us with feedback
Speaker 3: on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
Speaker 3: for the future, or just to say hello, you can
Speaker 3: email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 3: dot com.
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