blue whales

Ok I guess you guys want a break from all that tosh I usually rave or rant about, right? Yeah so today I'm going to rave about the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus).

First thing is, it's freaking huge and heavy. Those monsters generally weigh 150-170 tonnes - after they've been cut up because they can't be weighed whole. And not because they're too heavy; because they're too large to be weighed. And the longest whales ever recorded were >33m in length. Crikey. I don't think the stomach could fit in my miserably modest flat.

And yet it would choke on a beach ball. Blimey. Blue whales eat krill, mostly, except when they accidentally catch small fish, squid, or plastic bags. I'm sure I eat larger stuff than that. I mean, I eat cows. (Though admittedly, carved up.) And that's precisely what makes the blue whale so disarmingly endearing: the combination of zomg hugeness and awww vulnerability. And how can you go wrong with that?

For their 7 months blue whales drink about 400 litres of milk a day. That's insane. How many human babies can that feed? I think a standard dosage of milk is what... 400-500ml? So what, a thousand servings of milk for little toddles? Get this: we should give up on cows and farm blue whales for milk. Never mind if it tastes like piss, they'll all grow up to drink Starbucks anyway (and apparently, think it's "good coffee", both of which are descriptors that I have semantic issues with) so might as well start young right? 

I won't start on their mating rituals, but apparently they sing underwater. The only time humans sing with water in their mouths is at class parties while playing forfeits for stupid games, when they should know better, ahem Daniel.

And what's more, its scientific name is an original Latin pun. (Not like, say, homo which has acquired a double meaning only fairly recently.) Balaenoptera, as far as I can tell, means "whale-thing" and comes from the Middle English word baleen, meaning whale. But musculus is the clincher: it may mean either muscular or little mouse (mouse is mus in Latin). I think that for a biologist that's an extremely acute sense of humour Linnaeus had. Maybe it was a drunken bet. (So the more buff you get, the closer you are to being a little mouse. Irony ftw!)

I think blue whales are quite possibly, other than some humans of course, nearly the coolest animals ever. Adam might question me, but he's just jealous, even if he'd never admit it. xP