April 25, 2023 • 39 mins
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the science of whale spout, as well as various misconceptions about just how watery, caustic or explosive these plumes really are. (Part 1 of 2)
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. So a few weeks back
on the show, we did a series of episodes on
the Pacific gray whale. That series was based on some
actual travels that you and your family did rob with
where you got to encounter these wonderful beasts up close.
(00:36):
But ever since then, I've had a bit of a
low grade whale fever, and so based on maybe not
physical travels in the world, but literary travels of the mind,
I've been drawn back to the subject of wales. Today.
We are returning to talk not about a particular species
of whale, but about a particular anatomical feature common to wales,
(01:00):
the respiratory orifice of the cetacean, known as the spout
or the spiracle, or most commonly today, the blowhole.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
That's right, one of the most famous features of the whale.
If you know nothing else about the whale, if your
knowledge of whale anatomy is limited to cartoons and emojis,
you know something of the spout, you may have the
wrong idea of what it's all about, and we'll get
into that in this episode. But you know that whales
do this right.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
The saying is not thar she filter feeds. The saying
is thar she blows right now. I actually became interested
in this subject because I was reading a chapter in
the great American whale novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville.
Basic plot summary. A wandering young man named Ishmael and
(01:50):
his new companion quek weig enlist on a whale ship
captained by a man named Ahab, who is on a
revenge quest against a sperm whale that previously removed his leg.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
A classic tale. Even if you're not familiar with the
with the book itself, you've probably seen one of the
many film adaptations over the years.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
Yes, though, you know if you just watch a movie,
there is a quality to the text of Moby Dick
that probably won't quite come across because this is not
a strictly plot oriented story. It's not a novel where
the action of the plot always just kind of proceeds
ahead at a predictable pace. Many chapters of this book
are more like self contained informational or meditational essays on
(02:38):
subjects of all kinds. So there are little There are
chapters that are essays about the tackle and equipment of
whaling vessels, the monkey rope, the harpoon that you know,
all the different things. There are chapters about the accuracy
or relative lack thereof, of whale illustrations in books. There's
a chapter about clam chowder. There are chapters about way heads.
(03:00):
There's one chapter where he does phrenology on a whale head.
There are chapters about whale skin, whale tails, et cetera. Now,
when it comes to the quote seatology of Moby Dick,
it seems to be Melville is all over the place,
sourcing his information in some cases from published works of
(03:21):
naturalists of his day, which was, of course, of you know,
we would judge, by the scientific standards of today, of
mixed quality to begin with. And in other cases he
seems to be relying on kind of the trade knowledge
of sailors and whalemen. Some of his biological observations I
think seem fairly keen, and others are bizarre or downright implausible.
(03:44):
A very commonly cited example, though I don't know if
this represents the personal belief of Melville of the author
the narrator, Ishmael is firmly committed to the claim that
whales are fish. They are not, They're mammals. In fact,
I was reading about this in a paper called Herman
Melville Marine Biologist, by Harold Morowitz, published in The Biological
(04:05):
Bulletin in twenty eleven about the idea that whales are mammals.
Morowitz rights, quote this was not a new finding. Aristotle
in History of Animals some twenty two hundred years earlier. Oh, actually,
he's saying earlier than Linnaeus had noticed the difference between
members of the whales and porpoises and other marine inhabitants
(04:26):
the fish. He based this distinction on the cetaceans having
the mammalian properties of being warm blooded, breathing air through lungs,
and feeding the young through memory glands. Melville, though through
his spokesman Ishmael, strongly disagreed and was willing to place
the anecdotal knowledge of a seaman against the formal knowledge
of academics. He insists that a whale is quote a
(04:49):
spouting fish with a horizontal tail.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Well, I guess this kind of falls under the whole
semen versus landsman sort of thing, right, like woad Aristotle, No,
never served on a whaling vessel.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
That's right. This kind of came up in our Grey
Whale series two. What was the context? So was it
arguments about how aggressive actually the gray whale is.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Yeah, if you go by the accounts of whalers who
did get to you know, throw in their their, their, their,
their two cents and name various things about whales as well. Yeah,
according to them, the gray whale is just an absolute monster,
you know, that will just absolutely destroy anything in its path,
which it's certainly capable of, as we discuss if it
(05:33):
has been provoked, but if it's not provoked, it as
a very peaceful and curious creature. Right.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
So anyway, the narrator Ishmael's claims about whales, while in
my opinion always fascinating, are a mixed bag of some
sharp observations, some weird untruths, as well as ambiguous claims
somewhere in the middle. And I came across a number
of all of the above recently in chapter eighty five
(06:00):
of this book, which is called the Fountain. This chapter
is a consideration of the blowhole of the whale and
the towering exhalations from it, which, by the way, are
of great significance to whalers, because the spoutings of the
blowhole are what whalers use to cite the whales out
on the open sea and track them down.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Yeah, that's the varsy blows, right. I love that this
chapter is called the Fountain because, as we'll discuss, like
even the title of this chapter is deceptive.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Right, So Rob, if you don't mind, I'm gonna I'm
gonna set the themes here by reading the first couple
of paragraphs of this chapter excellently.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
Are you gonna use the sailor voice from that?
Speaker 3 (06:40):
I'm not gonna do pirate voice. Okay, I'm not strong enough. Okay.
So this is from Moby Dick by Herman Melville, the
chapter The Fountain that for six thousand years, and no
one knows how many millions of ages before, the great
whales should have been spouting all over the sea and
sprinkling and mystifying the gardens of the deep, as with
(07:02):
so many sprinkling or mystifying pots, And that for some
centuries back, thousands of hunters should have been close by
the fountain of the Whale, watching these sprinklings and spoutings,
that all this should be. And yet that down to
this blessed minute fifteen and a quarter minutes past one
o'clock pm on this sixteenth day of December eighty eighteen
(07:24):
fifty one, it should still remain a problem whether these
spoutings are after all really water or nothing but vapor.
This is surely a noteworthy thing. And then, skipping a
bit into the next paragraph, everyone knows that, by the
peculiar cunning of their gills, the finny tribes in general
(07:45):
breathe the air, which at all times is combined with
the element in which they swim. Hence, a herring or
a cod might live a century and never once raise
its head above the surface. But owing to his marked
internal sar structure, which gives him regular lungs like a
human being's, the whale can only live by inhaling the
(08:06):
disengaged air in the open atmosphere, wherefore the necessity for
his periodical visits to the upper world. But he cannot
in any degree breathe through his mouth, for in his
ordinary attitude, the sperm whale's mouth is buried at least
eight feet beneath the surface. And what is still more,
his windpipe has no connection with his mouth. No, he
(08:30):
breathes through his spiracle alone, and this is on the
top of his head.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
Now, so far, so good. I mean, nothing too out
of whack and all that, I think.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
Oh sure, And I think this does help give you
a sense of some of the wide eyed admiration and
the power of the mystery in describing whales at this
time when, like documentary footage was not a thing that
existed yet. You know, people couldn't like see planet Earth
and see what whales looked like. So you know, most
people probably never would have seen any whale in person.
(09:02):
Even if you had, you probably would have only seen them,
you know, breaching the surface occasionally or spouting from below.
Like you wouldn't have the kind of familiarity with whales
that even the average person has today just through being
able to see them in movies and documentaries.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Right, And of course, depending on when you're trying, you're
looking out to the ocean and potentially seeing a whale,
that their ability to see them might be greatly reduced
by human whaling enterprise, which you know certainly initially greatly
reduced the number of whales that would have been close
to shore and then eventually got into those populations that
were further from shore.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Yeah. Now, so this chapter on the fountain, on one hand,
it simply made me want to investigate the blowhole and
whale respiration as a subject in itself, which we will do.
But this chapter also raises a number of controversies and
Strange claims that I wanted to further investigate. One of
the controversies that Melville opens the chapter by acknowledging is
(10:03):
the question of what is the spout or what is
it that comes out of the spout? I guess it
depends on what you're using the word spout to refer
to there. But yet, what is coming out of the blowhole?
Is it water or is it, as Ishmael says, quote,
nothing but vapor. That's a question that did seem to
be a live one to some degree in Melville's day.
(10:23):
But also as far as Strange claims go, here's one
for you I want to read from later in the chapter.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Are you ready, Rob, Yes, let's have it.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
Okay, so he says, quote, nor is it at all
prudent for the hunter to be over curious touching the
precise nature of the whale spout? It will not do
for him to be peering into it and putting his
face in it. You cannot go with your pitcher to
this fountain and fill it and bring it away, For
even when coming into slight contact with the outer vapory
(10:54):
shreds of the jet, which will often happen, your skin
will feverishly smart the acridness of the thing so touching it.
And I know one who coming into still closer contact
with the spout, whether with some scientific object in view
or otherwise, I cannot say, the skin peeled off from
his cheek and arm. Wherefore, among Whalemen the spout is
(11:18):
deemed poisonous. They try to evade it. Another thing I
have heard it said, and I do not much doubt
it that if the jet is fairly spouted into your eyes,
it will blind you. The wisest thing the investigator can do, then,
it seems to me, is to let this deadly spout alone. Okay,
(11:39):
So I read that, and I was like, what is
going on here? This sounds wrong to me. But I
wonder if there's some kind of basis to it, or
some way this rumor could have gotten started that would
be identifiable. I don't know. So that's another thing I
want to explore. The allegedly deadly, poisonous blinding spout steals
your power of sight, melts away your flesh like xenomorph blood.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
This is something else. This goes beyond discussions of water
versus mists, because this is just not true. You know,
we mentioned my time with my family down in Mexico
getting to observe the gray whales. So when we were
out there, there would often be multiple gray whales around
(12:23):
the boat constantly, you know, breathing close to the surface.
And I should point out these were casual breaths. These
were not breaths that were occurring after deep dive or
anything like that, but still pretty explosive exhalations, a lot
of mist floating around in the air. I definitely got
whale spout on me from these mists, and I saw
(12:47):
on more than one occasion somebody take a rather stiff
blast of the whale spout directly in the face. Now
I don't recall if they had sunglasses on or what,
but it was it was alarming, but it wasn't anything
that caused undue grief or stress. It was one of
those things you kind of laugh about afterwards. You wash
(13:07):
off your face. And some of my fellow whale watchers,
they really took it as kind of a point of pride,
you know, they're like, they referred to it as a
kind of baptism. You know, you're just, hey, you wanted
to get close to these creatures. It doesn't get a
lot closer than that.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
But what about your skin? Did it peel off or
do you still have your skin on?
Speaker 2 (13:25):
I still have all, I mean all my skin was
intact following each of these episodes out on the water.
People who were blasted full on in the face also
were fine. So yeah, I mean, the only thing that
comes to mind is, I guess it seems possible that
someone could have in some sort of an allergic reaction
to something in the whale spout, but I've never heard
(13:46):
this is actually occurring.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
Yeah, it seems to be based on everything I've read
that You're right, I could not find any evidence that
what comes out of a whales blowhole is actually poisonous
or acrid to the point that it will will burn
your skin away. But we can still come back to this,
and I don't know, maybe at least try to investigate
anything we can figure out about the claim itself, despite
the fact that it seems obviously not true.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Right, Let's get into the basic science of whale spout
or whale blow. What is whale blow well? Its discussed
by Mark Carwadine in The Handbook of Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises,
(14:30):
an excellent book that I referred to several times in
our previous series on the gray whale. Whale blow or
whale spout refers to both the whales act of breathing
explosive exhalation followed by immediate inhalation, and also it refers
to the visible misty cloud that hangs in the air
afterwards quote condensed water, a fine spray of mucus from
(14:51):
inside the lungs, and seawater trapped in the blowholes. And
I think this was one of the main reasons that
I did take a little extra care to avoid staring
down over the side of the boat at a blowhole,
because I did not want to be sneezed full on
in the face by one of these these leviathans. But
I was not deathly afraid of it, and I'm fearful
(15:13):
of my sight.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Well sure, and you might want to avoid that, not
just because of the forcefulness of the blow. But for
another I mean one of the same reasons you wouldn't
want a human to sneeze in your face, which is
that like when somebody sneezes, that mucus might contain significant
loading of bacteria, and yeah, you don't know what that's
going to be.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Yeah. Yeah, so I avoided it, but I also didn't
feel bad about I certainly got plenty of the mist
on me, because if you have multiple gray whales in
your vicinity, you're just in a cloud of the stuff.
So it's unavoidable. Yeah, so, you know, breaking it down
to brass tax here the obvious whales. Of course, as
we've stated aquatic mammals, they have to come to the
surface to breathe, but hold their breath while underwater, and
(15:54):
according to Hammond at All in the book Whales Their
Biology and Behavior, whales consciously can they're breathing, unlike most mammals,
who are reflex breathers like us. They breathe through their blowholes,
which are sometimes called their nares, which are essentially evolved
nostrils which can be muscularly opened and closed, and as
(16:15):
the authors point out, quote the air pressure in the
nasal passage is higher than the ambient pressure at the surface,
leading to the explosive release of air from the blowhole.
The exhaled air from the whales inside is warmer than
the surrounding air and carries moisture, which condenses into the
visible blow that so often is the first tell tale
sign of a whale. Now, as we've discussed in the
(16:38):
show before, baileen whales have two holes, while toothed whales
have only one. Baileane whales also have a raised blowhole
with a frontal splash guard. It's the explosive exhalation and
quick inhalation takes a mere second in the smaller whales
in just a few seconds in the giant. So there's
a real economy of breathing in all of this. You know,
(17:00):
you come up to the surface, and contrary to a
lot of the he illustrations of whales, their whole head
does not come up. I mean, they can do some
of this, but it's not necessary for breathing. All they
have to do is just get the top of their
head that little blowhole above the water. To pull this
off in a manner of seconds and according to the
National Marine Life Center, just one exhalation pretty much empties
(17:22):
of whale's entire lungs. One of our exhalations only empties
part of our lungs.
Speaker 3 (17:27):
Now, this is an interesting fact that I thought was
worth looking at a little bit deeper, this thing about
whale lungs and capacity and the extent to which that
capacity is used. So I started thinking about the comparison
to underwater breath holding in humans. Most people who have
no special training can comfortably hold their breath underwater for
(17:48):
about a minute. I've seen estimates ranging from like one
to two minutes to thirty to ninety seconds. I don't
know if that depends on how old the population you're
looking at is, or you know, how physically fit they are,
but still, you know, the average person is not going
to be able to stay under that long, maybe a
couple minutes. Now, with conditioning, humans can stay under water
(18:09):
a lot longer. I was actually I was trying to
find the current human record for underwater breath holding, and
according to Guinness World Records, the record holder is a
Croatian man named Budimir Shobot, who on March twenty seventh,
twenty twenty one, stayed underwater for twenty four minutes and
(18:30):
thirty seven seconds, and at first I was like, wait
a second, that just cannot be correct. That is too long.
That is more than two full playthroughs of the album
length version, not the single version of I'd Do Anything
for Love, but I won't do that. Can't imagine it.
(18:52):
And to some degree my instincts were confirmed because I
realized there's a big caveat here Showbot's record and many
other people who compete for this particular record. This was
for a special category of breath holding, oxygen assisted voluntary
breath holding. So in this category, before you go under
(19:12):
the water, you can spend up to thirty minutes ventilating
with one hundred percent pure oxygen from a tank. So
this is a pre dive hyper ventilation process to like
superoxygenate your body. Of course, one hundred percent pure oxygen's
much higher than the content in the air. We normally
breathe at twenty one percent oxygen. So yeah, the people
(19:35):
who do this, they are super oxygenating their body before
they start. And also, of course this guy was highly trained.
He spent more than three years training six days a week.
So twenty four and a half minutes is the record
for this technology assisted hyper ventilation category. But I was
trying to find the not technology assisted version, and I
(19:55):
found a twenty twenty three article by a University of
Windsor kinesio pologist named Anthony Bain, and he writes that
the record for breath holding if you don't pregame with
pure oxygen, is less than half that. It is possibly
eleven minutes and thirty five seconds for men, which is
a record held by Stefan Mifsud. Though there's some dispute
(20:17):
about this one because there's also a guy named Bronco
Petrovitch who holds a record accredited by Guinness but not
by this other organization, a governing body called the International
Association for the Development of Apnea, which apparently does some
kind of certification of these records. And I don't want
to get drawn into a knife fight about which record
is legitimate, but let's just say the unassisted record for
(20:42):
men is somewhere between the eleven to twelve minute range,
and the record for women is nine minutes and two seconds,
held by Natalia Mulkanova.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Yeah, we don't want to make any enemies of people
who can hold their breath this long.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
That does sound dangerous, just as a side note speaking
of people who can hold their breath shockingly long time.
This article also mentioned something I hadn't heard of at all,
Apparently in preparation for the filming of Avatar Too, The
Way of Water. The actress Kate Winslet trained in underwater
breath holding for several weeks, and on set she was
(21:18):
able to stay underwater for more than seven minutes, something
that I am sure, no matter how much I trained,
I could not do. She did this on camera too,
and you can watch a video of it. When she
pops up at the end, she asks, am I dead?
So hats off to Kate.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (21:33):
By the way, did you see Way of Water? I
haven't seen it yet.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
I did. Yeah, My family and I just doing the holidays.
It was super cold. One morning we got up and
saw a morning showing of Avatar two, complete with coffee
and multiple bathroom breaks because it's super long. But yeah,
it's fun and it's got space whales in it, so
that's kind of neat. You know.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
There are some whales that can stay underwater without breathing
longer than we can go in a movie without a
bathroom break at least finish coffee involved, Yes, but While
that is individual records, there are also there are whole
cultures of people who regularly do extended underwater free diving
(22:16):
and standard for a long period of time. I was
looking at one study quickly just to mention by Ilardo
at All published in the journal Cell in twenty eighteen
called Physiological and Genetic Adaptations to Diving in Sea Nomads.
And this study was examining adaptations in the Sama people
also known as the Bajoo, a nomadic sea living people
(22:41):
of Southeast Asia who are well known for their amazing
free diving skills. In some cases they spend several hours
a day underwater, not continuously, but they will stay under
continuously for minutes at a time while free diving to
retrieve things from below. And this is part of been
part of their culture for thousands of years. And so
(23:02):
this study did some genomic and anatomical analysis of these
people to say, well, you know, the free diving skill
is common in their culture, do they typically have any
differences that assist in that? And the study did find
quote using a comparative genomic study, we showed that natural
selection on genetic variants in the PDE one zero a
(23:24):
gene have increased spleen size in the bajow, providing them
with a larger reservoir of oxygenated red blood cells. We
also find evidence of strong selections specific to the bajow
on bdk RB two, a gene affecting the human diving reflex.
And so they say that people living in this culture
(23:45):
have developed specific adaptations for hypoxia tolerance, for being better
at going longer with holding their breath underwater. But anyway
to come back to this sort of untrained natural human
range of peace, people who don't practice diving commonly, you know,
it's maybe like one to two minutes on average, more
like nine to twelve minutes at the extreme. Some whale species,
(24:09):
on the other hand, have, in extreme cases, as we said,
been observed to stay under the surface for hours. And
while that might not be normal, it's normal for whales
to stand er for longer than the unassisted record for humans.
It's commonly cited that sperm whales can stay under for
ninety minutes while hunting. So the question is how do
(24:30):
they do this? You might naturally assume the answer is
that the whales have bigger lungs, they can take a
deeper breath hold in more air because they've got bigger lungs.
But actually that's not the case. The strange thing is,
relative to body size, whales have significantly smaller lungs than humans.
Human lungs are roughly seven percent of body size on average,
(24:54):
but whale lungs can be less than half that, at
about three percent of body size.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
That's fast, that's a great point.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
Yeah, So how does that worry the standard for like
movie length times while having lungs that are relatively smaller
than ours. So I was reading about this in a
book called The Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals edited by burned
In Puran from Academic Press two thousand and nine, and
(25:22):
there was a chapter on breathing in marine mammals by
the marine biologist Douglas Wartsock. And here's where we come
back to what you said, Rob about the relative difference
in how much the lung can empty. This concerns a
biological metric known as the tidal volume. Tidal volume is
the amount of air that is inhaled and exhaled during
(25:45):
normal respiration. It turns out most animals do not completely
empty and refill their lungs with each breath. Instead, they're
always exchanging some fractional percentage of the gas in their
lungs fresh air from the outside. What percentage of the
total lung capacity is exchanged with each breath varies by species,
(26:08):
and I guess probably also would vary with individual animals too,
but there are certainly species differences and there are trends
with groups of animals. According to Wartsock, the tidal volume
is a bigger percentage of the animal's total lung capacity
when you're looking at marine mammals than when you're looking
(26:28):
at terrestrial mammals. So you look at an average terrestrial mammal, horses, humans,
whatever tidal volume is going to be something like ten
to fifteen percent of total lung capacity. Meanwhile, for marine mammals,
and this would include not just whales, but other marine mammals,
pinnipeds and so forth, average tidal volume is much higher,
(26:51):
usually more than seventy five percent of total lung capacity,
so many multiples beyond the depth of gas exchange that
we accomplish when we breathe. For sea mammals like whales,
breathing in and out is just a more dramatic activity.
They're emptying and refilling to a near total extent, and
(27:13):
that's just for normal respiration. For what works out calls
vital capacity essentially the maximum title volume you're capable of
when you're like really breathing in and out as deeply
as you can. That rarely exceeds seventy five percent of
lung capacity in land based mammals, but marine mammals can
go higher than ninety percent. So even though again whales
(27:36):
might have smaller lungs relative to body size, they can
like almost totally collapse that lung to exhale and then
reinflate the lung totally, like huge exchange of gas. And
the question would be what makes that difference? Why would
marine mammals have the ability to sort of crush out
their lungs like that. Well, we can't really do the
(27:58):
same thing, Wortok says, quote. Marine mammal lungs contain more
elastic tissue than those of terrestrial mammals. The ribs contain
more cartilage and are thus more compliant than those of
terrestrial mammals. The lung is also more compliant. Marine mammal
lungs can collapse and reinflate repeatedly, whereas in terrestrial mammals,
(28:20):
lung collapse is a serious situation that requires intervention to reinflate,
although both terrestrial mammals and marine mammals inspire actively and
expire passively, so there's active working of a muscle to
breathe in and then relaxing of the muscle to breathe out. Quote.
(28:40):
The features noted earlier allow much greater elastic recoil of
the lungs chest, cavity, and diaphragm, and thus a greater
tidal volume in proportion to total lung capacity. So he's
almost painting a picture of whale lungs as this kind
of I don't know, like super elastica balloon or is
something that just kind of like springs back and forth.
(29:02):
And I know this isn't biologically accurate, but to my mind,
I was thinking about with this like, you know, naturally
collapsing lung that's just part of the breathing process. It's
almost in my brain like a whoope cushion being sat
on every time the whale breathes out.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Yeah, I mean all of this. I think it brings
up something that is at once obvious about the whale
and also you know, a lot more sublime in many
ways as well. And that is of course that when
you look back at what whales may have looked like,
what their bodies may have been like when they were
land based organisms or their ancestors were, and you look
(29:41):
at their forms now, it's like they have changed so much,
they have evolved so much to become these masters of
the ocean, and there are all these various features like
this where it's just it's just absolutely alarming when you
look closer, even though I mean very obviously this is
the nature of the whale when you just look at
even just a basic sketch of their anatomy.
Speaker 3 (30:02):
Yes, absolutely, I mean this once eons ago quadrupedal mammal
that lived an ever increasing amount of its life in
the water and eventually became a fully marine organism. And
now one of its adaptations is that its lungs almost
completely collapse when it breeds out and create this forceful
burst of exhalation that is, in the end, what we
(30:25):
see when the whale, when the whale spouts or when
the blowhole opens, and it can be incredibly powerful when
the lung collapses. Wartsock writes, quote in gray whale calves
the duration of expiration and inhalation is closer to half
a second, but the tidal volume can be as great
as sixty two leaders, and the maximum flow rate is
(30:48):
as great as two hundred and two leaders per second.
Gas flows through the external nares at speeds of forty
four meters per second during inspiration and two hundred meters
percent second during expiration, and that also he emphasizes how
efficient the breathing process is, saying that, like the breathing
(31:08):
out usually begins before the whale actually even breaks the
surface of the water, so it's like they're coming up
to break the surface, and then before they reach the surface,
the exhale starts, so it blasts, and then that might
create some of the water you actually see. Another part
of what appears to be water coming out of the
blowhole is the condensing of the of the vapor from
(31:30):
the lungs. But then it's over the surface for just
a little bit of time. It uses that time while
it's out to breathe in suddenly and then it goes
back under.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
Yeah. In my experiences out there with the gray whales too,
the Yeah, it's depending on when they're releasing their exhalation.
If they're releasing it when the blowhole is above or
mostly above the surface of the water. That creates one
type of spout. But if they release it underneath the
(31:59):
water by even say, you know, a few inches or more,
you're going to have even more water coming up. It's
going to be even more of a of what feels
like a fountain to the face or to the side
of the boat.
Speaker 3 (32:20):
Now, one last thing I wanted to mention about why
whales can stay under so long. Actually first came across
this and just an interesting informational video by a marine
ecologist at the University of New South Wales named Professor
Tracy Rogers, and this was pointing out, in addition to
stuff about the lungs, the capacity of cetaceans to just
(32:41):
store more oxygen in their body tissues. So beyond what
gas the lungs are capable of holding the storage of
oxygen in the hemoglobin and red blood cells. You know,
both humans and whales marine mammals. In terrestrial mammals store
oxygen in the hemoglobin, but whales have much more hemoglobin
(33:01):
in their blood, which is one reason that their blood
might appear darker red than the blood of terrestrial mammals.
I don't know if you've ever seen whale blood, but
I feel like I have noticed this before that it
comes out so dark red it almost looks kind of
like black or purple.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
I suppose I've seen it in documentaries.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
Yes, yeah, But also whales simply have more blood relative
to their body size than terrestrial mammals generally do, and
they have more myoglobin in their muscles to store oxygen,
as well as other adaptations that just have to do
with how the body of the whale uses oxygen once
(33:40):
it is submerged, So it has adaptations that can, say,
turn off delivery of oxygen to certain body systems that
are not necessarily being used at the moment while the
whale is deeply submerged. So if it's a deep underwater
hunting and it's not going to come up for a while,
it might sort of reduce oxygen usage of its digestive
(34:00):
system or something like that.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
Now we've discussed how the ancestors of whales had frontal
nostrils at the ends of their snouts before on the show,
and how the nostrils travel up to the top of
the head over the course of their evolution, becoming the blowhole.
We can see evidence of this journey in fossil remains,
and we can also see this movement in their fetal development.
(34:25):
We can watch the blowhole move up the face and head,
and I believe we mostly discuss the energy efficiency of
a snout breather having to bring the whole head up
as opposed to the top of the head, and Hammond
at All also point out that this positioning definitely shades
down the breathing time over the course of evolution. So
(34:46):
all they have to do, they don't have to bring
the snout up to breathe. All they have to do
is just get the blowhole itself above the surface of
the water. And like we've been saying in so many changes,
I mean, the whale is a creature that has just
been completely transformed by its journey into and its mastery
of the ocean over the course of its evolution. And
(35:08):
you can there's so many examples of this, but one
that came up is this that they have no facial sinuses,
presumably to avoid complications with diving. Anyone out there if
you're a diver, and you may know that some of
the complications that can occur if you're say clogged your
sinuses are clogged up or something like that. Even if
you're flying, you can sometimes encounter problems with this, and
(35:31):
so this is this is just one problem that the
whale has eliminated through its evolution. Now, coming back to
the visible spout of the whale, the blow of the whale,
as one would see from a distance that archually blows.
It's it's worth noting that it's this is something that
Mark Carbadine discusses in Hambook of Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises.
(35:53):
The blow or the spout of a whale is very
distinctive with larger whales, and it can be categorized by height, shape,
and visibility. And that's not to say it's easy to do.
There's an art to it. An experienced whale watcher has
to take into account various factors such as wind, rain,
air temperature, light quality, which can all of these can
(36:15):
you distort the shape of the spout or the degree
to which the spout is visible. And also we have
to take into account that the first spout after a
long dive tends to be far stronger, which I think
we can sort of relate to that. I mean, that's
kind of our experience of breathing after holding one's breath
for a period of time. Also, individual whale size is
(36:36):
going to play a role in all this, and also
behavior of an individual whale will also be a factor. Still,
if you know what you're doing, you can make out
the species of a great whale, especially at a distance.
To give a few basic examples of note, here and Joe,
I sent you some snapshot of some of the illustrations
(36:56):
from Carlodine's book to look at in your email. There.
But the gray whale, which we discussed in previous episodes
is known for its heart shaped plume up to five meters.
The sperm whale is also known for its spout. It
has a single blowhole spout off to the side up
to six meters. The blue whale spout is a single
(37:17):
vertical plume of up to twelve meters. Then the North
Atlantic right whale is interesting. Like other right whales, it
has two spouts, one off to either side up to
seven meters. And then with the orca, which of course
we discussed at length in our gray whale series, up
to five meters, bushy at the top and projected slightly forward.
Speaker 3 (37:38):
Yeah, these illustrations are lovely and they do almost kind
of look like a silhouettes of different tree species that
you would identify like that, you know, oh, that's the
maple and that's the spruce right right.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
So any book you have, particular and in particular the
Handbook of Whales, Dolphins and Porposes, Yeah, it has pages
of these where you can compare them. But then also
each species profiled in the book, they have this image
of what it's spout would basically look like. Again, you'd
have to take into account some of these factors though.
All right, Well, on that note, we're going to go
(38:09):
ahead and close out this episode, but we'll be back
for a part two on all of this. I believe
this will be a two parter, so come back on Thursday.
We have more to discuss more on this whole idea
that the Herman Melville's talking about, that a whale spout
is going to burn your skin off, poison you, and
(38:30):
blind you. We'll see what some contemporary critics we're saying
about all of that, and we'll get into some other
areas surrounding whale spout. In the meantime, if you would
like to check out other episodes of stuff to blow
your mind, including checking out that multi part series we
did on the Gray Whale and it's travels its relationship
(38:51):
with the Orcas. You can find that in the Stuff
to Blow Your Mind podcast. Feed core episodes on Tuesdays
and Thursdays. On Mondays we do a listener mail, on
Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster fact,
and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to
just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (39:06):
Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
for the future, or just to say hello, you can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. So a few weeks back
on the show, we did a series of episodes on
the Pacific gray whale. That series was based on some
actual travels that you and your family did rob with
where you got to encounter these wonderful beasts up close.
(00:36):
But ever since then, I've had a bit of a
low grade whale fever, and so based on maybe not
physical travels in the world, but literary travels of the mind,
I've been drawn back to the subject of wales. Today.
We are returning to talk not about a particular species
of whale, but about a particular anatomical feature common to wales,
(01:00):
the respiratory orifice of the cetacean, known as the spout
or the spiracle, or most commonly today, the blowhole.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
That's right, one of the most famous features of the whale.
If you know nothing else about the whale, if your
knowledge of whale anatomy is limited to cartoons and emojis,
you know something of the spout, you may have the
wrong idea of what it's all about, and we'll get
into that in this episode. But you know that whales
do this right.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
The saying is not thar she filter feeds. The saying
is thar she blows right now. I actually became interested
in this subject because I was reading a chapter in
the great American whale novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville.
Basic plot summary. A wandering young man named Ishmael and
(01:50):
his new companion quek weig enlist on a whale ship
captained by a man named Ahab, who is on a
revenge quest against a sperm whale that previously removed his leg.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
A classic tale. Even if you're not familiar with the
with the book itself, you've probably seen one of the
many film adaptations over the years.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
Yes, though, you know if you just watch a movie,
there is a quality to the text of Moby Dick
that probably won't quite come across because this is not
a strictly plot oriented story. It's not a novel where
the action of the plot always just kind of proceeds
ahead at a predictable pace. Many chapters of this book
are more like self contained informational or meditational essays on
(02:38):
subjects of all kinds. So there are little There are
chapters that are essays about the tackle and equipment of
whaling vessels, the monkey rope, the harpoon that you know,
all the different things. There are chapters about the accuracy
or relative lack thereof, of whale illustrations in books. There's
a chapter about clam chowder. There are chapters about way heads.
(03:00):
There's one chapter where he does phrenology on a whale head.
There are chapters about whale skin, whale tails, et cetera. Now,
when it comes to the quote seatology of Moby Dick,
it seems to be Melville is all over the place,
sourcing his information in some cases from published works of
(03:21):
naturalists of his day, which was, of course, of you know,
we would judge, by the scientific standards of today, of
mixed quality to begin with. And in other cases he
seems to be relying on kind of the trade knowledge
of sailors and whalemen. Some of his biological observations I
think seem fairly keen, and others are bizarre or downright implausible.
(03:44):
A very commonly cited example, though I don't know if
this represents the personal belief of Melville of the author
the narrator, Ishmael is firmly committed to the claim that
whales are fish. They are not, They're mammals. In fact,
I was reading about this in a paper called Herman
Melville Marine Biologist, by Harold Morowitz, published in The Biological
(04:05):
Bulletin in twenty eleven about the idea that whales are mammals.
Morowitz rights, quote this was not a new finding. Aristotle
in History of Animals some twenty two hundred years earlier. Oh, actually,
he's saying earlier than Linnaeus had noticed the difference between
members of the whales and porpoises and other marine inhabitants
(04:26):
the fish. He based this distinction on the cetaceans having
the mammalian properties of being warm blooded, breathing air through lungs,
and feeding the young through memory glands. Melville, though through
his spokesman Ishmael, strongly disagreed and was willing to place
the anecdotal knowledge of a seaman against the formal knowledge
of academics. He insists that a whale is quote a
(04:49):
spouting fish with a horizontal tail.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Well, I guess this kind of falls under the whole
semen versus landsman sort of thing, right, like woad Aristotle, No,
never served on a whaling vessel.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
That's right. This kind of came up in our Grey
Whale series two. What was the context? So was it
arguments about how aggressive actually the gray whale is.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Yeah, if you go by the accounts of whalers who
did get to you know, throw in their their, their, their,
their two cents and name various things about whales as well. Yeah,
according to them, the gray whale is just an absolute monster,
you know, that will just absolutely destroy anything in its path,
which it's certainly capable of, as we discuss if it
(05:33):
has been provoked, but if it's not provoked, it as
a very peaceful and curious creature. Right.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
So anyway, the narrator Ishmael's claims about whales, while in
my opinion always fascinating, are a mixed bag of some
sharp observations, some weird untruths, as well as ambiguous claims
somewhere in the middle. And I came across a number
of all of the above recently in chapter eighty five
(06:00):
of this book, which is called the Fountain. This chapter
is a consideration of the blowhole of the whale and
the towering exhalations from it, which, by the way, are
of great significance to whalers, because the spoutings of the
blowhole are what whalers use to cite the whales out
on the open sea and track them down.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Yeah, that's the varsy blows, right. I love that this
chapter is called the Fountain because, as we'll discuss, like
even the title of this chapter is deceptive.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Right, So Rob, if you don't mind, I'm gonna I'm
gonna set the themes here by reading the first couple
of paragraphs of this chapter excellently.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
Are you gonna use the sailor voice from that?
Speaker 3 (06:40):
I'm not gonna do pirate voice. Okay, I'm not strong enough. Okay.
So this is from Moby Dick by Herman Melville, the
chapter The Fountain that for six thousand years, and no
one knows how many millions of ages before, the great
whales should have been spouting all over the sea and
sprinkling and mystifying the gardens of the deep, as with
(07:02):
so many sprinkling or mystifying pots, And that for some
centuries back, thousands of hunters should have been close by
the fountain of the Whale, watching these sprinklings and spoutings,
that all this should be. And yet that down to
this blessed minute fifteen and a quarter minutes past one
o'clock pm on this sixteenth day of December eighty eighteen
(07:24):
fifty one, it should still remain a problem whether these
spoutings are after all really water or nothing but vapor.
This is surely a noteworthy thing. And then, skipping a
bit into the next paragraph, everyone knows that, by the
peculiar cunning of their gills, the finny tribes in general
(07:45):
breathe the air, which at all times is combined with
the element in which they swim. Hence, a herring or
a cod might live a century and never once raise
its head above the surface. But owing to his marked
internal sar structure, which gives him regular lungs like a
human being's, the whale can only live by inhaling the
(08:06):
disengaged air in the open atmosphere, wherefore the necessity for
his periodical visits to the upper world. But he cannot
in any degree breathe through his mouth, for in his
ordinary attitude, the sperm whale's mouth is buried at least
eight feet beneath the surface. And what is still more,
his windpipe has no connection with his mouth. No, he
(08:30):
breathes through his spiracle alone, and this is on the
top of his head.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
Now, so far, so good. I mean, nothing too out
of whack and all that, I think.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
Oh sure, And I think this does help give you
a sense of some of the wide eyed admiration and
the power of the mystery in describing whales at this
time when, like documentary footage was not a thing that
existed yet. You know, people couldn't like see planet Earth
and see what whales looked like. So you know, most
people probably never would have seen any whale in person.
(09:02):
Even if you had, you probably would have only seen them,
you know, breaching the surface occasionally or spouting from below.
Like you wouldn't have the kind of familiarity with whales
that even the average person has today just through being
able to see them in movies and documentaries.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Right, And of course, depending on when you're trying, you're
looking out to the ocean and potentially seeing a whale,
that their ability to see them might be greatly reduced
by human whaling enterprise, which you know certainly initially greatly
reduced the number of whales that would have been close
to shore and then eventually got into those populations that
were further from shore.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Yeah. Now, so this chapter on the fountain, on one hand,
it simply made me want to investigate the blowhole and
whale respiration as a subject in itself, which we will do.
But this chapter also raises a number of controversies and
Strange claims that I wanted to further investigate. One of
the controversies that Melville opens the chapter by acknowledging is
(10:03):
the question of what is the spout or what is
it that comes out of the spout? I guess it
depends on what you're using the word spout to refer
to there. But yet, what is coming out of the blowhole?
Is it water or is it, as Ishmael says, quote,
nothing but vapor. That's a question that did seem to
be a live one to some degree in Melville's day.
(10:23):
But also as far as Strange claims go, here's one
for you I want to read from later in the chapter.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Are you ready, Rob, Yes, let's have it.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
Okay, so he says, quote, nor is it at all
prudent for the hunter to be over curious touching the
precise nature of the whale spout? It will not do
for him to be peering into it and putting his
face in it. You cannot go with your pitcher to
this fountain and fill it and bring it away, For
even when coming into slight contact with the outer vapory
(10:54):
shreds of the jet, which will often happen, your skin
will feverishly smart the acridness of the thing so touching it.
And I know one who coming into still closer contact
with the spout, whether with some scientific object in view
or otherwise, I cannot say, the skin peeled off from
his cheek and arm. Wherefore, among Whalemen the spout is
(11:18):
deemed poisonous. They try to evade it. Another thing I
have heard it said, and I do not much doubt
it that if the jet is fairly spouted into your eyes,
it will blind you. The wisest thing the investigator can do, then,
it seems to me, is to let this deadly spout alone. Okay,
(11:39):
So I read that, and I was like, what is
going on here? This sounds wrong to me. But I
wonder if there's some kind of basis to it, or
some way this rumor could have gotten started that would
be identifiable. I don't know. So that's another thing I
want to explore. The allegedly deadly, poisonous blinding spout steals
your power of sight, melts away your flesh like xenomorph blood.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
This is something else. This goes beyond discussions of water
versus mists, because this is just not true. You know,
we mentioned my time with my family down in Mexico
getting to observe the gray whales. So when we were
out there, there would often be multiple gray whales around
(12:23):
the boat constantly, you know, breathing close to the surface.
And I should point out these were casual breaths. These
were not breaths that were occurring after deep dive or
anything like that, but still pretty explosive exhalations, a lot
of mist floating around in the air. I definitely got
whale spout on me from these mists, and I saw
(12:47):
on more than one occasion somebody take a rather stiff
blast of the whale spout directly in the face. Now
I don't recall if they had sunglasses on or what,
but it was it was alarming, but it wasn't anything
that caused undue grief or stress. It was one of
those things you kind of laugh about afterwards. You wash
(13:07):
off your face. And some of my fellow whale watchers,
they really took it as kind of a point of pride,
you know, they're like, they referred to it as a
kind of baptism. You know, you're just, hey, you wanted
to get close to these creatures. It doesn't get a
lot closer than that.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
But what about your skin? Did it peel off or
do you still have your skin on?
Speaker 2 (13:25):
I still have all, I mean all my skin was
intact following each of these episodes out on the water.
People who were blasted full on in the face also
were fine. So yeah, I mean, the only thing that
comes to mind is, I guess it seems possible that
someone could have in some sort of an allergic reaction
to something in the whale spout, but I've never heard
(13:46):
this is actually occurring.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
Yeah, it seems to be based on everything I've read
that You're right, I could not find any evidence that
what comes out of a whales blowhole is actually poisonous
or acrid to the point that it will will burn
your skin away. But we can still come back to this,
and I don't know, maybe at least try to investigate
anything we can figure out about the claim itself, despite
the fact that it seems obviously not true.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Right, Let's get into the basic science of whale spout
or whale blow. What is whale blow well? Its discussed
by Mark Carwadine in The Handbook of Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises,
(14:30):
an excellent book that I referred to several times in
our previous series on the gray whale. Whale blow or
whale spout refers to both the whales act of breathing
explosive exhalation followed by immediate inhalation, and also it refers
to the visible misty cloud that hangs in the air
afterwards quote condensed water, a fine spray of mucus from
(14:51):
inside the lungs, and seawater trapped in the blowholes. And
I think this was one of the main reasons that
I did take a little extra care to avoid staring
down over the side of the boat at a blowhole,
because I did not want to be sneezed full on
in the face by one of these these leviathans. But
I was not deathly afraid of it, and I'm fearful
(15:13):
of my sight.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Well sure, and you might want to avoid that, not
just because of the forcefulness of the blow. But for
another I mean one of the same reasons you wouldn't
want a human to sneeze in your face, which is
that like when somebody sneezes, that mucus might contain significant
loading of bacteria, and yeah, you don't know what that's
going to be.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Yeah. Yeah, so I avoided it, but I also didn't
feel bad about I certainly got plenty of the mist
on me, because if you have multiple gray whales in
your vicinity, you're just in a cloud of the stuff.
So it's unavoidable. Yeah, so, you know, breaking it down
to brass tax here the obvious whales. Of course, as
we've stated aquatic mammals, they have to come to the
surface to breathe, but hold their breath while underwater, and
(15:54):
according to Hammond at All in the book Whales Their
Biology and Behavior, whales consciously can they're breathing, unlike most mammals,
who are reflex breathers like us. They breathe through their blowholes,
which are sometimes called their nares, which are essentially evolved
nostrils which can be muscularly opened and closed, and as
(16:15):
the authors point out, quote the air pressure in the
nasal passage is higher than the ambient pressure at the surface,
leading to the explosive release of air from the blowhole.
The exhaled air from the whales inside is warmer than
the surrounding air and carries moisture, which condenses into the
visible blow that so often is the first tell tale
sign of a whale. Now, as we've discussed in the
(16:38):
show before, baileen whales have two holes, while toothed whales
have only one. Baileane whales also have a raised blowhole
with a frontal splash guard. It's the explosive exhalation and
quick inhalation takes a mere second in the smaller whales
in just a few seconds in the giant. So there's
a real economy of breathing in all of this. You know,
(17:00):
you come up to the surface, and contrary to a
lot of the he illustrations of whales, their whole head
does not come up. I mean, they can do some
of this, but it's not necessary for breathing. All they
have to do is just get the top of their
head that little blowhole above the water. To pull this
off in a manner of seconds and according to the
National Marine Life Center, just one exhalation pretty much empties
(17:22):
of whale's entire lungs. One of our exhalations only empties
part of our lungs.
Speaker 3 (17:27):
Now, this is an interesting fact that I thought was
worth looking at a little bit deeper, this thing about
whale lungs and capacity and the extent to which that
capacity is used. So I started thinking about the comparison
to underwater breath holding in humans. Most people who have
no special training can comfortably hold their breath underwater for
(17:48):
about a minute. I've seen estimates ranging from like one
to two minutes to thirty to ninety seconds. I don't
know if that depends on how old the population you're
looking at is, or you know, how physically fit they are,
but still, you know, the average person is not going
to be able to stay under that long, maybe a
couple minutes. Now, with conditioning, humans can stay under water
(18:09):
a lot longer. I was actually I was trying to
find the current human record for underwater breath holding, and
according to Guinness World Records, the record holder is a
Croatian man named Budimir Shobot, who on March twenty seventh,
twenty twenty one, stayed underwater for twenty four minutes and
(18:30):
thirty seven seconds, and at first I was like, wait
a second, that just cannot be correct. That is too long.
That is more than two full playthroughs of the album
length version, not the single version of I'd Do Anything
for Love, but I won't do that. Can't imagine it.
(18:52):
And to some degree my instincts were confirmed because I
realized there's a big caveat here Showbot's record and many
other people who compete for this particular record. This was
for a special category of breath holding, oxygen assisted voluntary
breath holding. So in this category, before you go under
(19:12):
the water, you can spend up to thirty minutes ventilating
with one hundred percent pure oxygen from a tank. So
this is a pre dive hyper ventilation process to like
superoxygenate your body. Of course, one hundred percent pure oxygen's
much higher than the content in the air. We normally
breathe at twenty one percent oxygen. So yeah, the people
(19:35):
who do this, they are super oxygenating their body before
they start. And also, of course this guy was highly trained.
He spent more than three years training six days a week.
So twenty four and a half minutes is the record
for this technology assisted hyper ventilation category. But I was
trying to find the not technology assisted version, and I
(19:55):
found a twenty twenty three article by a University of
Windsor kinesio pologist named Anthony Bain, and he writes that
the record for breath holding if you don't pregame with
pure oxygen, is less than half that. It is possibly
eleven minutes and thirty five seconds for men, which is
a record held by Stefan Mifsud. Though there's some dispute
(20:17):
about this one because there's also a guy named Bronco
Petrovitch who holds a record accredited by Guinness but not
by this other organization, a governing body called the International
Association for the Development of Apnea, which apparently does some
kind of certification of these records. And I don't want
to get drawn into a knife fight about which record
is legitimate, but let's just say the unassisted record for
(20:42):
men is somewhere between the eleven to twelve minute range,
and the record for women is nine minutes and two seconds,
held by Natalia Mulkanova.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Yeah, we don't want to make any enemies of people
who can hold their breath this long.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
That does sound dangerous, just as a side note speaking
of people who can hold their breath shockingly long time.
This article also mentioned something I hadn't heard of at all,
Apparently in preparation for the filming of Avatar Too, The
Way of Water. The actress Kate Winslet trained in underwater
breath holding for several weeks, and on set she was
(21:18):
able to stay underwater for more than seven minutes, something
that I am sure, no matter how much I trained,
I could not do. She did this on camera too,
and you can watch a video of it. When she
pops up at the end, she asks, am I dead?
So hats off to Kate.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (21:33):
By the way, did you see Way of Water? I
haven't seen it yet.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
I did. Yeah, My family and I just doing the holidays.
It was super cold. One morning we got up and
saw a morning showing of Avatar two, complete with coffee
and multiple bathroom breaks because it's super long. But yeah,
it's fun and it's got space whales in it, so
that's kind of neat. You know.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
There are some whales that can stay underwater without breathing
longer than we can go in a movie without a
bathroom break at least finish coffee involved, Yes, but While
that is individual records, there are also there are whole
cultures of people who regularly do extended underwater free diving
(22:16):
and standard for a long period of time. I was
looking at one study quickly just to mention by Ilardo
at All published in the journal Cell in twenty eighteen
called Physiological and Genetic Adaptations to Diving in Sea Nomads.
And this study was examining adaptations in the Sama people
also known as the Bajoo, a nomadic sea living people
(22:41):
of Southeast Asia who are well known for their amazing
free diving skills. In some cases they spend several hours
a day underwater, not continuously, but they will stay under
continuously for minutes at a time while free diving to
retrieve things from below. And this is part of been
part of their culture for thousands of years. And so
(23:02):
this study did some genomic and anatomical analysis of these
people to say, well, you know, the free diving skill
is common in their culture, do they typically have any
differences that assist in that? And the study did find
quote using a comparative genomic study, we showed that natural
selection on genetic variants in the PDE one zero a
(23:24):
gene have increased spleen size in the bajow, providing them
with a larger reservoir of oxygenated red blood cells. We
also find evidence of strong selections specific to the bajow
on bdk RB two, a gene affecting the human diving reflex.
And so they say that people living in this culture
(23:45):
have developed specific adaptations for hypoxia tolerance, for being better
at going longer with holding their breath underwater. But anyway
to come back to this sort of untrained natural human
range of peace, people who don't practice diving commonly, you know,
it's maybe like one to two minutes on average, more
like nine to twelve minutes at the extreme. Some whale species,
(24:09):
on the other hand, have, in extreme cases, as we said,
been observed to stay under the surface for hours. And
while that might not be normal, it's normal for whales
to stand er for longer than the unassisted record for humans.
It's commonly cited that sperm whales can stay under for
ninety minutes while hunting. So the question is how do
(24:30):
they do this? You might naturally assume the answer is
that the whales have bigger lungs, they can take a
deeper breath hold in more air because they've got bigger lungs.
But actually that's not the case. The strange thing is,
relative to body size, whales have significantly smaller lungs than humans.
Human lungs are roughly seven percent of body size on average,
(24:54):
but whale lungs can be less than half that, at
about three percent of body size.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
That's fast, that's a great point.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
Yeah, So how does that worry the standard for like
movie length times while having lungs that are relatively smaller
than ours. So I was reading about this in a
book called The Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals edited by burned
In Puran from Academic Press two thousand and nine, and
(25:22):
there was a chapter on breathing in marine mammals by
the marine biologist Douglas Wartsock. And here's where we come
back to what you said, Rob about the relative difference
in how much the lung can empty. This concerns a
biological metric known as the tidal volume. Tidal volume is
the amount of air that is inhaled and exhaled during
(25:45):
normal respiration. It turns out most animals do not completely
empty and refill their lungs with each breath. Instead, they're
always exchanging some fractional percentage of the gas in their
lungs fresh air from the outside. What percentage of the
total lung capacity is exchanged with each breath varies by species,
(26:08):
and I guess probably also would vary with individual animals too,
but there are certainly species differences and there are trends
with groups of animals. According to Wartsock, the tidal volume
is a bigger percentage of the animal's total lung capacity
when you're looking at marine mammals than when you're looking
(26:28):
at terrestrial mammals. So you look at an average terrestrial mammal, horses, humans,
whatever tidal volume is going to be something like ten
to fifteen percent of total lung capacity. Meanwhile, for marine mammals,
and this would include not just whales, but other marine mammals,
pinnipeds and so forth, average tidal volume is much higher,
(26:51):
usually more than seventy five percent of total lung capacity,
so many multiples beyond the depth of gas exchange that
we accomplish when we breathe. For sea mammals like whales,
breathing in and out is just a more dramatic activity.
They're emptying and refilling to a near total extent, and
(27:13):
that's just for normal respiration. For what works out calls
vital capacity essentially the maximum title volume you're capable of
when you're like really breathing in and out as deeply
as you can. That rarely exceeds seventy five percent of
lung capacity in land based mammals, but marine mammals can
go higher than ninety percent. So even though again whales
(27:36):
might have smaller lungs relative to body size, they can
like almost totally collapse that lung to exhale and then
reinflate the lung totally, like huge exchange of gas. And
the question would be what makes that difference? Why would
marine mammals have the ability to sort of crush out
their lungs like that. Well, we can't really do the
(27:58):
same thing, Wortok says, quote. Marine mammal lungs contain more
elastic tissue than those of terrestrial mammals. The ribs contain
more cartilage and are thus more compliant than those of
terrestrial mammals. The lung is also more compliant. Marine mammal
lungs can collapse and reinflate repeatedly, whereas in terrestrial mammals,
(28:20):
lung collapse is a serious situation that requires intervention to reinflate,
although both terrestrial mammals and marine mammals inspire actively and
expire passively, so there's active working of a muscle to
breathe in and then relaxing of the muscle to breathe out. Quote.
(28:40):
The features noted earlier allow much greater elastic recoil of
the lungs chest, cavity, and diaphragm, and thus a greater
tidal volume in proportion to total lung capacity. So he's
almost painting a picture of whale lungs as this kind
of I don't know, like super elastica balloon or is
something that just kind of like springs back and forth.
(29:02):
And I know this isn't biologically accurate, but to my mind,
I was thinking about with this like, you know, naturally
collapsing lung that's just part of the breathing process. It's
almost in my brain like a whoope cushion being sat
on every time the whale breathes out.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Yeah, I mean all of this. I think it brings
up something that is at once obvious about the whale
and also you know, a lot more sublime in many
ways as well. And that is of course that when
you look back at what whales may have looked like,
what their bodies may have been like when they were
land based organisms or their ancestors were, and you look
(29:41):
at their forms now, it's like they have changed so much,
they have evolved so much to become these masters of
the ocean, and there are all these various features like
this where it's just it's just absolutely alarming when you
look closer, even though I mean very obviously this is
the nature of the whale when you just look at
even just a basic sketch of their anatomy.
Speaker 3 (30:02):
Yes, absolutely, I mean this once eons ago quadrupedal mammal
that lived an ever increasing amount of its life in
the water and eventually became a fully marine organism. And
now one of its adaptations is that its lungs almost
completely collapse when it breeds out and create this forceful
burst of exhalation that is, in the end, what we
(30:25):
see when the whale, when the whale spouts or when
the blowhole opens, and it can be incredibly powerful when
the lung collapses. Wartsock writes, quote in gray whale calves
the duration of expiration and inhalation is closer to half
a second, but the tidal volume can be as great
as sixty two leaders, and the maximum flow rate is
(30:48):
as great as two hundred and two leaders per second.
Gas flows through the external nares at speeds of forty
four meters per second during inspiration and two hundred meters
percent second during expiration, and that also he emphasizes how
efficient the breathing process is, saying that, like the breathing
(31:08):
out usually begins before the whale actually even breaks the
surface of the water, so it's like they're coming up
to break the surface, and then before they reach the surface,
the exhale starts, so it blasts, and then that might
create some of the water you actually see. Another part
of what appears to be water coming out of the
blowhole is the condensing of the of the vapor from
(31:30):
the lungs. But then it's over the surface for just
a little bit of time. It uses that time while
it's out to breathe in suddenly and then it goes
back under.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
Yeah. In my experiences out there with the gray whales too,
the Yeah, it's depending on when they're releasing their exhalation.
If they're releasing it when the blowhole is above or
mostly above the surface of the water. That creates one
type of spout. But if they release it underneath the
(31:59):
water by even say, you know, a few inches or more,
you're going to have even more water coming up. It's
going to be even more of a of what feels
like a fountain to the face or to the side
of the boat.
Speaker 3 (32:20):
Now, one last thing I wanted to mention about why
whales can stay under so long. Actually first came across
this and just an interesting informational video by a marine
ecologist at the University of New South Wales named Professor
Tracy Rogers, and this was pointing out, in addition to
stuff about the lungs, the capacity of cetaceans to just
(32:41):
store more oxygen in their body tissues. So beyond what
gas the lungs are capable of holding the storage of
oxygen in the hemoglobin and red blood cells. You know,
both humans and whales marine mammals. In terrestrial mammals store
oxygen in the hemoglobin, but whales have much more hemoglobin
(33:01):
in their blood, which is one reason that their blood
might appear darker red than the blood of terrestrial mammals.
I don't know if you've ever seen whale blood, but
I feel like I have noticed this before that it
comes out so dark red it almost looks kind of
like black or purple.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
I suppose I've seen it in documentaries.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
Yes, yeah, But also whales simply have more blood relative
to their body size than terrestrial mammals generally do, and
they have more myoglobin in their muscles to store oxygen,
as well as other adaptations that just have to do
with how the body of the whale uses oxygen once
(33:40):
it is submerged, So it has adaptations that can, say,
turn off delivery of oxygen to certain body systems that
are not necessarily being used at the moment while the
whale is deeply submerged. So if it's a deep underwater
hunting and it's not going to come up for a while,
it might sort of reduce oxygen usage of its digestive
(34:00):
system or something like that.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
Now we've discussed how the ancestors of whales had frontal
nostrils at the ends of their snouts before on the show,
and how the nostrils travel up to the top of
the head over the course of their evolution, becoming the blowhole.
We can see evidence of this journey in fossil remains,
and we can also see this movement in their fetal development.
(34:25):
We can watch the blowhole move up the face and head,
and I believe we mostly discuss the energy efficiency of
a snout breather having to bring the whole head up
as opposed to the top of the head, and Hammond
at All also point out that this positioning definitely shades
down the breathing time over the course of evolution. So
(34:46):
all they have to do, they don't have to bring
the snout up to breathe. All they have to do
is just get the blowhole itself above the surface of
the water. And like we've been saying in so many changes,
I mean, the whale is a creature that has just
been completely transformed by its journey into and its mastery
of the ocean over the course of its evolution. And
(35:08):
you can there's so many examples of this, but one
that came up is this that they have no facial sinuses,
presumably to avoid complications with diving. Anyone out there if
you're a diver, and you may know that some of
the complications that can occur if you're say clogged your
sinuses are clogged up or something like that. Even if
you're flying, you can sometimes encounter problems with this, and
(35:31):
so this is this is just one problem that the
whale has eliminated through its evolution. Now, coming back to
the visible spout of the whale, the blow of the whale,
as one would see from a distance that archually blows.
It's it's worth noting that it's this is something that
Mark Carbadine discusses in Hambook of Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises.
(35:53):
The blow or the spout of a whale is very
distinctive with larger whales, and it can be categorized by height, shape,
and visibility. And that's not to say it's easy to do.
There's an art to it. An experienced whale watcher has
to take into account various factors such as wind, rain,
air temperature, light quality, which can all of these can
(36:15):
you distort the shape of the spout or the degree
to which the spout is visible. And also we have
to take into account that the first spout after a
long dive tends to be far stronger, which I think
we can sort of relate to that. I mean, that's
kind of our experience of breathing after holding one's breath
for a period of time. Also, individual whale size is
(36:36):
going to play a role in all this, and also
behavior of an individual whale will also be a factor. Still,
if you know what you're doing, you can make out
the species of a great whale, especially at a distance.
To give a few basic examples of note, here and Joe,
I sent you some snapshot of some of the illustrations
(36:56):
from Carlodine's book to look at in your email. There.
But the gray whale, which we discussed in previous episodes
is known for its heart shaped plume up to five meters.
The sperm whale is also known for its spout. It
has a single blowhole spout off to the side up
to six meters. The blue whale spout is a single
(37:17):
vertical plume of up to twelve meters. Then the North
Atlantic right whale is interesting. Like other right whales, it
has two spouts, one off to either side up to
seven meters. And then with the orca, which of course
we discussed at length in our gray whale series, up
to five meters, bushy at the top and projected slightly forward.
Speaker 3 (37:38):
Yeah, these illustrations are lovely and they do almost kind
of look like a silhouettes of different tree species that
you would identify like that, you know, oh, that's the
maple and that's the spruce right right.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
So any book you have, particular and in particular the
Handbook of Whales, Dolphins and Porposes, Yeah, it has pages
of these where you can compare them. But then also
each species profiled in the book, they have this image
of what it's spout would basically look like. Again, you'd
have to take into account some of these factors though.
All right, Well, on that note, we're going to go
(38:09):
ahead and close out this episode, but we'll be back
for a part two on all of this. I believe
this will be a two parter, so come back on Thursday.
We have more to discuss more on this whole idea
that the Herman Melville's talking about, that a whale spout
is going to burn your skin off, poison you, and
(38:30):
blind you. We'll see what some contemporary critics we're saying
about all of that, and we'll get into some other
areas surrounding whale spout. In the meantime, if you would
like to check out other episodes of stuff to blow
your mind, including checking out that multi part series we
did on the Gray Whale and it's travels its relationship
(38:51):
with the Orcas. You can find that in the Stuff
to Blow Your Mind podcast. Feed core episodes on Tuesdays
and Thursdays. On Mondays we do a listener mail, on
Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster fact,
and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to
just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (39:06):
Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
for the future, or just to say hello, you can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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