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Whales Are Sprinters: What a Blue Whale's Heart Does When It Lunge Feeds
What happens to the heart of the largest animal on Earth when it charges into a swarm of krill? Dr. Ashley Blawas, a postdoctoral scholar in Jeremy Goldbogen's lab at Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station, joins Andrew to unpack new research published in PNAS that measured the heart rates of lunge-feeding blue whales and humpback whales using suction-cup ECG tags.
Ashley explains the three phases of lunge feeding (accelerate, engulf, filter) and why these giants behave a lot like human sprinters. Their heart rates stay high after each lunge, then gradually recover while they glide and filter…
The skinny
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