BrainStuff Classics: How Long Can Animals Hold Their Breath?

Humans tend to max out at a couple minutes of breath holding, but some air-breathing reptiles and even mammals have evolved to spend extreme lengths of time underwater. Learn how long (and how they manage it) in this classic episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://animals.howstuffworks.com/animal-facts/what-animal-can-hold-its-breath-longest.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
I'm Lauren vogelbaumb and this is a classic episode of
the podcast. In this one, we get into the weird
biology of how some air breathing mammals and reptiles managed
to hold their breath underwater for minutes or even hours

(00:22):
at a time. Hey brainstuff, Lauren Vogel bomb here you like,
most humans can probably hold your breath for about two minutes,
though in twenty sixteen, Guinness World Records clocked free diver
a leash Seguravendrol of Barcelona, Spain, holding his breath for
a little over twenty four minutes, which is of course
completely wild. Humans aren't built for breath holding. We've got

(00:46):
other priorities like world domination. If we had spent even
a little more of our evolutionary history working on holding
in air instead of making our brains giant and complex,
we probably could survive without oxygen at least as long
as the average beaver, which is fifteen minutes. But there
are lots of air breathing animals that are built for
breath holding. A sloth can hold its breath for a

(01:07):
wapping forty minutes. Because it's able to decrease its heart
rate to about a third of the normal. A sleeping
sea turtle can hold its breath for up to seven
hours at a time. A loggerhead turtles often forage underwater
for around forty minutes in one go, but one study
of loggerhead activity found that males can voluntarily sustain themselves
on one breath or sometimes a quick charge up of

(01:28):
several successive breaths, for around ten hours. One female was
observed going as long as twenty hours. Some turtles can
spend all winter long at the bottom of a frozen
lake in deep hibernation, not using their lungs at all.
The turtle's secret is that during this period of almost
complete systems shut down, it does take in a tiny
bit of oxygen by breathing through its highly vascularized cloaca.

(01:52):
The kloaca being a single organ found in reptiles, birds, amphibians,
and even some mammals that serves as the animals exit
for its u urinary tract and digestive tract, and that's
also the opening for their reproductive tract. Yes, they pee, poop,
and have sex with this single organ in turtles with
chloacal respiration. They can also draw water up into their

(02:13):
kloaca and absorb oxygen from it, then flush it back out. Turtles, however,
are ectotherms animals that rely on outside sources for heat.
It's much easier for ectotherms to go without oxygen than endotherms.
Like US mammals, we use a lot of oxygen keeping
our systems running hot, which is why marine mammals like whales, seals,

(02:34):
and otters are so impressive. They can pull off unbelievably
long deep dives in order to hunt for food. Take
Coovi's beaked whale, the deepest diving of all marine mammals,
and the one scientists think holds the record for the
endotherm that's achieved the longest breath holding session. These midsized
whales can dive around ten thousand feet that's about three

(02:54):
thousand meters, hunting for squid and other deep sea goodies,
and they can hold their breath for an average of
sixty seven minutes, with one record dive that lasted one
hundred and thirty eight minutes before a Coovi's beaked whale
broke the previous record. A Northern elephant seal was the
gold medalist caught holding its breath at one hundred and
nineteen minutes. A sperm whale now comes in third place

(03:16):
at ninety minutes. That's a long time to go without
oxygen when you've got an expansive mammalian metabolism to keep up.
But lots of marine and aquatic mammals make it work
by slowing their heart rates and redirecting blood away from
their extremities into their brains, hearts, and muscles. They even
have special oxygen binding proteins in their muscles that allow

(03:36):
them to store more oxygen than us land lovers. Today's
episode is based on the article what animal can hold
express the longest on houstufforks dot com written by Jesslinshields.
Brain Stuff is production by Heart Radio in partnership with
houstuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Glang. Four

(03:57):
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