![]() ![]() Recording the whale’s heart, however, was much tougher than dealing with penguins. That got them wondering whether they could use the same technology on blue whales, which can reach 110 feet and can dive as deep as 1,600 feet. After surfacing to breathe following foraging dives, the whale had heart rates of 25 to 37 beats per minute.Scientists recently recorded the heart rate of a wild blue whale for the first time, finding that sometimes the world's largest mammal’s ticker beats only twice per minute.Ī decade ago, members of the research team placed trackers on emperor penguins at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, monitoring their heart-rates as the birds dove in the icy waters of the Southern Ocean. As filter-feeders, they take huge amounts of water into their mouths and strain out prey including shrimp-like krill and other zooplankton using baleen plates made of keratin, the same material found in fingernails.ĭuring feeding dives, the whale exhibited extremely low heart rates, typically of four to eight beats per minute and as low as two. As the whale surfaces to breathe, we tag the whale in a location that we think is closest to the heart: just behind the whale’s left flipper,” Goldbogen added.īaleen whales such as blue whales, despite their immense size, feed on tiny prey. “We then have to deploy the tag using a six-meter (20-foot) long carbon-fiber pole. By combining many years of field experience and some luck, we position a small, rigid-hulled, inflatable boat on the whale’s left side,” Goldbogen said. “First we have to find a blue whale, which can be very difficult because these animals range across vast swaths of the open ocean. The researchers obtained nine hours of data from an adult male whale about 72 feet (22 meters) long encountered in Monterey Bay off California’s coast. The device had four suction cups to enable them to attach it to the whale non-invasively. The researchers created a tag device, encased in an orange plastic shell, that contained an electrocardiogram machine to monitor a whale’s heart rhythm swimming in the open ocean. ![]() The smallest mammals, shrews, have heart rates upwards of a thousand beats per minute. The normal human resting heart rate ranges from about 60 to 100 beats per minute and tops out at about 200 during athletic exertion. Generally speaking, the larger the animal, the lower the heart rate, minimizing the amount of work the heart does while distributing blood around the body. “What is life like and what is the pace of life at such a large scale?”Īlso Read: In Science, It’s Better to Be Curious Than Correct “In particular, new measures of vital rates and physiological rates help us understand how animals work at the upper extreme of body mass,” Goldbogen added. “The blue whale is the largest animal of all-time and has long fascinated biologists,” said Stanford University marine biologist Jeremy Goldbogen, who led the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The maximum heart rate they recorded was 37 beats per minute after the air-breathing marine mammal returned to the surface from a foraging dive. The blue whale, which can reach up to 100 feet (30 meters) long and weigh 200 tons, lowers its heart rate to as little as two beats per minute as it lunges under the ocean surface for food, researchers said on Monday. Washington: Using a bright orange electrocardiogram machine attached with suction cups to the body of a blue whale, scientists for the first time have measured the heart rate of the world’s largest creature and came away with insight about the renowned behemoth’s physiology. ![]()
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