Are dolphins your porpoise for living? Think orcas are killer? Maybe you start blubbering when you think of belugas. Well that's no fluke. Whales are one of the coolest groups of animals on earth with so many specialized features that they might as well be from space.
If you're looking for some of the most mind-blowing facts about these awesome marine mammals, whale whale whale, you've come to the right place. When we say whales, we're talking about the order of animals called cetaceans, which are further divided into two subgroups, tooth whales and baleen whales. Despite living their whole lives in the water, whales are in fact mammals. They give birth to live young, they nurse with milk, and they're also the most active warm blooded.
They even have hair. Before they're born, whales are covered in a layer of fuzz called lanugo, and some even keep hair as adults. Like all mammals and other tetrapods, whales are descendants from ancient fish that crawled out of the water.
the water about 375 million years ago. But for some reason, cetaceans turned around and crawled right back in the ocean. About 50 million years ago, in what's now Pakistan, four-legged, wolf-sized creatures began to hunt in the water, and over time, evolution selected for traits that helped them in their aquatic lifestyle.
Cetacean nostrils gradually migrated back from their snout to on top of their head, where we find them today. Baleen whales still have two holes up there, while toothed whales only have one blowhole. Because whales descended from animals with limbs under their bodies, their backbones anchor the penises of male whales.
Okay then. Since they evolved from land mammals, it's no surprise that whales still have ears. But because of their deep diving lifestyle, they no longer have these floppy things to funnel sound, and their ear canals are no longer open to the outside.
But a lifetime's worth of earwax still builds up inside. Scientists can harvest these earplugs from dead whales and use them to study the diet and hormone levels every year the whale was alive. Just like really gross tree rings.
Tooth. Toothed whales, like dolphins and sperm whales, use echolocation to hunt and navigate. Cliques made in the nasal passages are focused by a mass of tissue in their forehead called the melon, and fatty tissues in their lower jaw pick up the returning echoes and deliver those vibrations to the inner ear.
Daily whales like humpbacks don't use echolocation, but are famous for their Spock, what do you make of that? Humpback whale songs are incredibly complex, with short phrases combined into themes that are mixed into songs, each lasting half an hour or more. They're like blubbery Beethovens. We're still not exactly sure how whales like humpbacks make these... singing sounds, but scientists think they might use this big sack under their vocal cords to squeeze air through the larynx, kind of like a bagpipe, and then recycling it into their lungs so they don't waste a breath.
Whales are technically carnivores and eat just about every kind of animal there is. in the ocean. Toothed whales like orcas, porpoises, and sperm whales eat everything from fish to squid to seals, while baleen whales use their bristly namesake to filter small animals like krill and plankton and even fish from huge gulps of water. When rorqual whales like humpbacks, fin whales, and blue whales sense food ahead, their mouth opens almost 90 degrees, and their split lower jawbone spreads wide like a fishing net. As they close their mouth, their giant tongue squeezes the water out through the mouth the baleen filter, leaving those tasty yum-yums behind.
Other baleen whales, like bowheads, don't open their jaws as wide, but instead ram up to 3,000 liters of water per second out the corners of their mouth as they filter out dinner. No whale is as weird as the narwhal. Contrary to popular belief, they are not unicorns wearing specially designed scuba suits. Those huge tusks, usually found only on males, are actually elongated canine teeth, sticking right out the front of their foreheads.
They don't have any teeth. teeth in their mouth, but those things more than make up for it. No one agrees exactly what the tusks are for, but some scientists say it's a sensory organ, while others say it's just for males to attract females.
But that doesn't really matter, because they're awesome. The Inuit even made harpoons out of narwhal tusks, tipped with iron from a meteorite. Are you kidding me? A blue whale can eat as much as four tons of Food in a day, and what goes in must come out.
When it comes to poop, whales go big. They often feed in the deep ocean, and their poop brings those nutrients up to the surface where they act as fertilizer for shallow ecosystems. It's estimated that sperm whales and the iron in their poop help sequester 200,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere every year by fecally fertilizing photosynthetic plankton. Whales set some amazing records, too. The deepest diving species, Cuvier's beaked whale, has been tracked to 3,000 meters below the surface.
And some bowhead whales have been found with harpoons dating from the 19th century still embedded in their bodies. This leads scientists to estimate their lifespan at up to 200 years. Finally, like all animals, whales eventually die. When whale carcasses, sometimes weighing more than 100 tons, fall into the ocean's dark depths. They can form mini-ecosystems called whale falls, sustaining countless deep sea species for decades.
Strange creatures like these zombie worms devour everything from the blubber to the bones. We hope you enjoyed this fact-packed whale tale and that you don't mind my occasional bad puns. If you're watching this right when it comes out, stay tuned because we're bringing you a week of amazing ocean-related videos from the Monterey Bay Aquarium. PBS and the BBC are teaming up for an incredible three-night event called Big Blue Live, where we'll be bringing you some of nature's greatest ocean wonders right as they happen.
I'll have a bunch of videos here on It's Okay to Be Smart, as well as over on the PBS Facebook page. We'll be talking about more whales, otters, penguins, jellyfish, octopus, and a few more surprises. I'll put links to all of that down below.
You can check out pbs.org slash bigbluelive for more. And I hope I'll be seeing you from the Big Blue. Stay Curious. It was the first spacecraft shot directly out of orbit, escaping the pole of the Earth and Sun with a launch velocity of over 16 kilometers per second.
The fastest spacecraft launch ever. The kind of mad science orbital trajectories you don't see outside of Kerbal Space Program. A year later it flew by Jupiter and used its gravity as a slingshot to speed toward its encounter in the Kuiper Belt. Before New Horizons, our view of Pluto made space invaders look high definition.