What is the size of a blue whale's heart? Destroying an established myth

The blue whale, or bluewalker, is the largest animal currently living on earth. Some individuals reach a length of 33 meters and weigh more than 150 tons. The lung volume of this giant is almost 3 thousand cubic meters, and the tongue weighs more than 3 tons. To ensure the blood circulation of a blue whale, a huge heart is needed. There is a lot of information on this topic on the Internet. Most sources assure that this organ in a whale is the size of a car and weighs more than a ton. But this is not true and we will now tell you about the real characteristics of the whale heart.

A photo of a huge mock-up of a heart, from which a child looks out through the opening of the aorta, is very popular on the web. Usually the signature says that it is a copy of the heart of a blue whale. This is a fake that has nothing to do with reality. The real heart of the largest animal on the planet is kept in the Royal Ontario Museum, in Canada.

Biologist Jacqueline Miller told the story of this exhibit in the popular science film BBC Big Blue Live. In 2014, nine dead whales were found off the coast of Newfoundland in North America. The animals were killed by a combination of several factors: a reduction in the food supply, a change in temperature and direction of flow, a large amount of ice.

The largest whale was 22 meters long, that is, medium-sized. Scientists dissected it and carefully extracted the heart. The organ was 150 cm long and 120 cm wide, and weighed 181 kg. Experts have estimated that one beat of such a heart pumps up to 220 liters of blood. It seems a little, given the size of the blue whale, but these mammals are not built like us.

The pulse rate of a blue whale is only 5-10 beats per minute. But these are very loud blows that the acoustic equipment of warships picks up for several kilometers. Yes, scientists did not get the largest specimen of a blue whale, but it is easy to calculate that a 33-meter colossus will have a heart only 1.5 times larger.

That is, there can be no question of any comparison with a car. The heart of the dead whale was taken to the laboratory and frozen. A year later, it was subjected to plastination, treated with formaldehyde and replaced with polymer resins. Now it is one of the most popular exhibits of the Royal Ontario Museum and visitors love to be photographed with it.

And the carcasses of dead whales can explode, and with great destructive force, and this is not fake at all.