How is this for a sentence to ponder?:
It’s a lot of water, the scientists have found: in one lunge, a fin whale can momentarily double its weight.
The full article is here and I'll peg it as one of the very best short pieces I've read this year. Here is another stunning excerpt:
In order to make lunge-feeding work, you have to have a really big
mouth to capture enough water in one gulp. But in order to have a big
mouth, you need a big body. And in order to keep that big body running,
you need to get a lot of food. And in the very act of getting that
food–diving deep, lunging open-mouthed, and then pushing a
school-bus-sized volume of water forwards–requires a lot of energy on
its own.Goldbogen and his colleagues wondered what sort of trade-off
lunge-feeding whales faced between the costs and the benefits of eating
like a parachute. To find out, they took advantage of measurements
scientists made of hundreds of fin whales at whaling stations in the
1920s.
For the pointer I thank Carl Zimmer. Herman Melville would have been proud.
“Small fin whales can swallow up about 90% of their own body weight. Very big ones can gulp 160%.”
This happens when you scale things up, anytime most of the mass is in the surface. Surface scales by ~ r^2 and volume by ~ r^3. Airplanes for example do this.
“Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live whale’s throat, and then jump after it? Answer, quick!†
“I am, sir, if it should be positively indispensable to do so; not to be got rid of, that is; which I don’t take to be the fact.†
Moby-Dick, page 81
Why,
What does momentarily mean in America? Something other than “for a moment”?
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