Scientists on Wednesday tracked some Cuvier's beaked whale using satellite-linked tags and found something fascinating. These medium-sized whales off the coast
of California dove down
nearly 1.9 miles and spent 2 hours and 17 minutes underwater before
resurfacing.
Remarkable!Those are breath-taking
accomplishments for an air-breathing creature. If there were a gold medal for cetacean diving, it undoubtedly would go to the Cuvier's beaked whale. In fact, those figures
represent both the deepest and the longest dives ever documented for any
marine mammal, said Greg Schorr of the Cascadia Research Collective in
Olympia, Wash., who led the study published in the journal PLOS ONE.
"Many
creatures live at the depths these whales dive to, including their
likely primary prey of squid and fish. However, there is a major
difference between these whales and the other creatures living deep in
the ocean — the fundamental requirement to breathe air at the surface,"
Schorr said.
"Taking a breath at
the surface and holding it while diving to pressures over 250 times that
at the surface is an astounding feat," Schorr added.
By way of comparison, the record for
a person holding his breath underwater is 22 minutes, according to the
Guinness Book of World Records. A person, of course, would never survive
the bone-crushing water pressure at those stupendous depths.
Cuvier's
beaked whales are widely distributed in many deep-water regions from
the tropics to cool temperate waters, though not in polar regions. They
measure up to about 23 feet long, with stout bodies shaped a bit like a
torpedo. Their foreheads slope into a short beak with a slightly
upturned mouth — leaving them with a vaguely "smiling" appearance.
Their color ranges from
gray to a reddish-brown to a pale white. Some are marked with linear
white scars caused by males raking other males with their teeth, perhaps
while competing for females. They feed primarily on deep-water squid
and some fish near the ocean floor.
"This
species is highly adapted to deep diving, spending less than two
minutes at the surface between dives," Schorr said. "These are social,
warm-blooded mammals that have adapted to actively pursue their prey at
astounding depths — all while up to 1.8 miles away from their most basic
physiological need: air."
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