Whales

Whales fit into the easy-to-love category of “charismatic megafauna”.

They’re enormous, they’re remote and rare enough to tickle our curiosity, and they don’t have any obvious bad habits (such as deliberately attacking humans).

So here’s two surprising facts about whales – some of them can double their weight each time that they have a feed, and whales were saved from almost-certain extinction by Fossil Fuels.

First, doubling their weight?

Now this applies only to filter-feeding whales. They are not the ones with big teeth, like sperm whales. Instead, they get their meals by sucking in water that happens to have tiny food (such as small crustaceans like krill) in it, and then squirt the water out again. But on the way out, a convenient mesh (called “baleen”) swivels down from the front and sides of their big mouth, and this mesh filters and catches the krill.

We don’t have the stats for the biggest whale (the blue whale), but we do for the second biggest whale (the fin whale, which weighs about 60 tonnes). The fin whale will lunge at a school of krill at about 10 kph, and as it hits the school will have its huge mouth open at a full 90 degrees.

This creates so much drag that it slows down to 2 kph – so it flaps its tail very vigorously to keep the water gushing inside. How much water? 70 tonnes! So this 60-tonne whale has more than doubled its weight up to 130 tonnes.

Then it pushes out that 70 tonnes of water, hanging onto just 11 kg of krill. That entire cycle takes just 3 seconds. The fin whale does this some 90 times each day, to get its daily nutritional requirements in one tonne of food.

You might have wondered about the long light-coloured strips on the belly of the filter-feeding whales. They act like the bellows on a piano accordion, and expand enormously to accommodate some 70 tonnes of water.

OK, that’s impressive, but what about Fossil Fuels saving the whale?

Well, think back to the early days of the Industrial Revolution. There was a shift from hand production to machine production, and people moved in enormous numbers, to where the factories and the jobs were.

So there there was an enormous need for an oil that could lubricate machines, as well as provide light and heat. Back then, that oil was whale oil. So whales were mercilessly hunted for their oil.

And then came crude oil, from underground. It could be refined into a variety of oils that could cover everything that whale oil could do.

On one hand, the fossil fuels contributed massively to the enormous air, ground and water pollution created during the Industrial Revolution.

But on the other hand, the demand for whale oil plummeted, because fossil fuels were cheaper, and available in much greater quantities than whale oil.

So fossil fuels stopped whales from turning into a fossil. We ending up saving the whale from ourselves.

And Big Fossil Fuel actually did some good – back then …