For the first time, scientists recorded a cardiogram from the largest animal that has ever lived.
The Atlantic said:The heart of a blue whale, diving off the coast of California, has just contracted. The beat took about two seconds to finish, and pushed dozens of gallons of blood through the arteries of the largest animal that lives or has ever lived. According to Jeremy Goldbogen of Stanford University, the first person to attach a heart monitor to a blue whale at sea, the creature’s organ constantly swings between extremes of speed. During a dive, it can conserve oxygen by slowing down to just two beats a minute. If you’re reading this piece at an average speed, that’s roughly one beat at the end of every paragraph. (Ba-bum.)
David Attenborough once claimed that the blue whale’s heart “is the size of a car, and that some of its blood vessels are so wide that you could swim down them.” Neither factoid is true. In 2015, when a dead blue whale washed ashore in Newfoundland, Canada, a dissection team from the Royal Ontario Museum managed to extract and measure its heart. At 400 pounds, it was undoubtedly and impressively big. But the main artery was barely big enough for a human head, and the whole organ was more like “a small golf cart or circus bumper car for two,” said Jacqueline Miller, a mammalogy technician, to the BBC. Goldbogen compares it to “an easy chair or a single-person sofa.” (Ba-bum.)
Goldbogen has spent decades studying blue whales by sticking data loggers on their back. The device, held in place by suction cups, can record a whale’s position, speed, and acceleration as it swims, dives, and forages. Goldbogen began to wonder whether, by adding electrodes to the suction cups, he could also capture a heartbeat. It would be just like the way a doctor takes an electrocardiogram from a human patient—except that the electrodes would have to record through inches of blubber, which meant they would need to be placed in just the right spot. “To be honest, I thought it wasn’t going to work,” Goldbogen says. (Ba-bum.)
He tried anyway. Between dives, blue whales surface for about 10 consecutive breaths, producing distinctive waterspouts. When Goldbogen and his team spotted one of these in Monterey Bay, California, they maneuvered their small inflatable boat to the animal’s left flank, and used a 20-foot pole to stick the heart monitor next to a flipper. The tag stayed. The whale descended. Several hours later, the tag floated back to the surface, and the team members retrieved it. When they downloaded the data and saw the traces of a beating heart, “we did a victory lap around the lab," Goldbogen says. “You have long days at sea and in front of a computer, but those are the moments you get into this business for.” (Ba-bum.)
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