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A blue whale’s heart can beat as few as two times a minute.
The discovery comes from data collected during researchers’ first few attempts to measure the heart rate of the world’s largest animal, and the results, published Monday (November 25) in PNAS, reveal how the whales survive their deep dives to find food.
Recording the whale’s heartbeat was not an easy feat. It required attaching electrodes sitting atop suction cups to the behemoth’s body at exactly the right spot—just behind the left flipper. “To be honest, I thought it wasn’t going to work,” study coauthor Jeremy Goldbogen, a zoologist at Stanford University, tells The Atlantic.
Much to Goldbogen’s surprise, the tactic did work. Maneuvering in a small, inflatable boat, he and his team sidled up to a blue whale that had surfaced in California’s Monterey Bay and used a 20-foot pole to tap the sensor ...
