In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the science of whale spout, as well as various misconceptions about just how watery, caustic or explosive these plumes really are. (Originally published 04/25/2023)
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I am Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. Time for a vault episode. This one originally published on April twenty fifth, twenty twenty three, and it's part one of our series. Do we call this the Arsy Blows? I think it's about the the spout of the whale we did. Yes, all right, let's get in there.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert.
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. So a few weeks back on the show, we did a series of episodes on the Pacific gray whale. That series was based on some actual travels that you and your family did rob with Uh, where you got to encounter these wonderful beasts up close. But ever since then, I've had a bit of a low grade whale fever, and so based on maybe not physical travels in the world, but literary travels of the mind, I've been drawn back to the subject of wales. Today we are returning to talk not about a particular species of whale, but about a particular anatomical feature common to wales, the respiratory orifice of the cetacean, known as the spout or the spiracle, or most commonly today, the blowhole.
That's right, one of the most famous features of the whale. If you know nothing else about the whale. If your knowledge of whale anatomy is limited to cartoons and emojis, you know something of the spout. You may have the wrong idea of what it's all about, and we'll get into that in this episode. But you know that whales do this right.
The saying is not thar she filter feeds. The saying is thar she blows right now. I actually became interested in this subject because I was reading a chapter in the great American whale novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Basic plot summary. A wandering young man named Ishmael and his new companion, queequeg enlist on a whale ship captained by a man named Ahab, who is on a revenge quest against a sperm whale that previously removed his leg.
A classic tale. Even if you're not familiar with the book itself, you've probably seen one of the many film adaptations over the years.
Yes, though, you know, if you just watch a movie, there is a quality to the text of Moby Dick that probably won't quite come across, because this is not a strictly plot oriented story. It's not a novel where the action of the plot always just kind of proceeds ahead at a predictable pace. Many chapters of this book are more like self contained informational or meditational essays on subjects of all kinds. So there are little There are chapters that are essays about the tackle and equipment of whaling vessels, the monkey rope, the harpoon that, you know, all the different things. There are chapters about the accuracy or relative lack thereof, of whale illustrations in books. There's a chapter about clam chowder. There are chapters about whale heads. There's one chapter where he does phrenology on a whale head. There are chapters about whale skin, whale tails, et cetera. Now, when it comes to the quote seatology of Moby Dick, it seems to be Melville is all over the place, sourcing his information in some cases from published works of naturalists of his day, which was of course of you know, we would judge by the scientific standards of today of mixed quality to begin with, and in other cases he seems to be relying on kind of the trade knowledge of sailors and whalemen. Some of his biological observations I think seem fairly keen, and others are bizarre or downright implausible. A very commonly cited example, though I don't know if this represents the personal belief of Melville. Of the author, the narrator, Ishmael is firmly committed to the claim that whales are fish. They are not, they're mammals. In fact, I was reading about this in a paper called Herman Melville Marine Biologist by Harold Morowitz, published in The Biological Bulletin in twenty eleven. About the idea that whales are mammals, Morowitz writes, quote, this was not a new finding. Aristotle in History of Animals, some twenty two hundred years earlier. Oh. Actually, he's saying earlier than Linaeus had noticed the difference between members of the whales and porpoises and other marine inhabitants. The fish. He based this distinction on the cetaceans having the a malian properties of being warm blooded breathing air through lungs and feeding the young through memory glands Melville, though through his spokesman Ishmael, strongly disagreed and was willing to place the anecdotal knowledge of a seaman against the formal knowledge of academics. He insists that a whale is quote, a spouting fish with a horizontal tail.
Well, I guess this kind of falls into the whole semen versus landsman sort of thing, right, Like what would Aristotle? No, he never he never served on a whaling vessel.
That's right. This kind of came up in our Grey Whale series two. What was the context? So was it arguments about how aggressive actually the gray whale is.
Yeah, if you go by the accounts of whalers who did get to you know, throw in their their their, their, their two cents and name various things about whales as well. Yeah, according to them, the gray whale is just an absolute monster, you know that that would just absolutely destroy anything in its path, which it's certainly capable of, as we discuss, if it has been provoked. But if it's not provoked, it as a very peaceful and curious creature. Right.
So, anyway, the narrator Ishmael's claims about whales, while in my opinion always fascinating, are a mixed bag of some sharp observations, some weird untruths, as well as ambiguous claims somewhere in the middle. And I came across a number of all of the above recently in chapter eighty five of this book, which is called The Fountain. This chapter is a consideration of the blowhole of the whale and the towering exhalations from it, which, by the way, are of great significance to whalers, because the spoutings of the blowhole are what whalers use to cite the whales out on the open sea and track them down.
Yeah, thus Varsy blows right. I love that this chapter is called the Fountain because, as we'll discuss, like even the title this chapter is deceptive.
Right, So you don't mind. I'm gonna set the themes here by reading the first couple of paragraphs of this chapter excellently.
Are you gonna use the sailor voice from that? I'm gonna.
I'm not gonna do pirate voice. Okay, I'm not strong enough. Okay. So this is from Moby Dick by Herman Melville the chapter the Fountain, that for six thousand years, and no one knows how many millions of ages before, the great whales should have been spouting all over the sea and sprinkling and mystifying the gardens of the deep, as with so many sprinkling or mystifying pots. And that for some centuries back thousands of hunters should have been close by the fountain of the whale, watching these sprinklings and spoutings. That all this should be. And yet that down to this blessed minute fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o'clock pm on this sixteenth day of December eighty eighteen fifty one, it should still remain a problem whether these spoutings are after all really water or nothing but vapor. This is surely a noteworthy thing. And then, skipping a bit into the next paragraph, everyone knows that by the peculiar cunning of their gills, the finny tribes in general breathe the air, which at all times is combined with the element in which they swim. Hence, a herring or a cod might live a century and never once raise its head above the surface, but owing to his marked internal structure which gives him regular lungs like a human being's. The whale can only live by inhaling the disengaged air in the open atmosphere, wherefore the necessity for his periodical visits to the upper world. But he cannot in any degree breathe through his mouth, for in his ordinary attitude, the sperm whale's mouth is buried at least eight feet beneath the surface. And what is still more, his windpipe has no connection with his mouth. No, he breathes through his spiracle alone, and this is on the top of his head.
Now, so far, so good. I mean, nothing too out of whack and all that, I think.
Oh sure, And I think this does help give you a sense of some of the wide eyed admiration and the power of the mystery in describing whales at this time when, like documentary footage was not a thing that existed. Yet you know, people couldn't like see planet Earth and see what whales looked like. So you know, most people probably never would have seen any whale in person. Even if you had, you probably would have only seen them, you know, breaching the surface occasionally or spouting from below. Like you wouldn't have the kind of familiarity with whales that even the average person has today just through being able to see them in movies and documentaries.
Right, and of course, depending on when you're trying, you're looking out through the ocean and potentially seeing a whale, that the ability to see them might be greatly reduced by human whaling enterprise, which you know certainly initially greatly reduced the number of whales that would have been close to shore and then eventually got into those populations that were further from shore.
Yeah. Now, so this chapter on the fountain, on one hand, it simply made me want to investigate the blowhole and whale respiration as a subject in itself, which we will do. But this chapter also raises a number of controversies and strange claims that I wanted to further investigate. One of the controversies that Melville opens the chapter by acknowledging is the question of what is the spout or what is it that comes out of the spout? I guess it depends on what you're using the word spout to refer to there, But yeah, what is coming out of the blowhole? Is it water or is it, as Ishmael says, quote, nothing but vapor that's a question that did seem to be a live one to some degree in Melville's day. But also as far as Strange claims go, here's one for you I want to read from later in the chapter. Are you ready, Rob?
Yes?
Okay, so he says, quote. Nor is it at all prudent for the hunter to be over curious touching the precise nature of the whale spout. It will not do for him to be peering into it and putting his face in it. You cannot go with your pitcher to this fountain and fill it and bring it away. For even when coming into slight contact with the outer vapory shreds of the jet, which will often happen, your skin will feverishly smart from the acridness of the thing so touching it. And I know one who, coming into still closer contact with the spout, whether with some scientific object in view or otherwise, I cannot say, the skin peeled off from his cheek and arm. Wherefore, among whalemen the spout is deemed poisonous, they try to evade it. Another thing I have heard it said, and I do not much doubt it that if the jet is fairly spouted into your eyes, it will blind you. The wise thing the investigator can do, then, it seems to me, is to let this deadly spout alone. Okay, so I read that and I was like, what is going on here? That this sounds wrong to me. But I wonder if there's some kind of basis to it, or some way this rumor could have gotten started that would be identifiable. I don't know, So that's another thing I want to explore. The allegedly deadly, poisonous blinding spout steals your power of sight, melts away your flesh like xenomorph blood.
This is something else. This goes beyond discussions of water versus mist, because this is just not true. And you know, we mentioned my time with my family down in Mexico getting to observe the gray whales. So when we were out there, there would often be multiple gray whales around the boat constantly, you know, breathing close to the surface. And I should point out these were casual breaths. These were not breaths that were occurring after deep dive or anything like that, but still pretty explosive exhalations, a lot of mist floating around in the air. I definitely got whale spout on me from these mists, and I saw on more than one occasion somebody take a rather stiff blast of the whale spout directly in the face. Now, I don't recall if they had sunglasses on or what, but it was it was alarming, but it wasn't anything that caused undue grief or stress. It was one of those things you kind of laugh about afterwards you wash off your face. And some of my fellow whale watchers, they really took it as kind of a point of pride, you know, they're like, it's they referred to it as a kind of baptism. You know, you're just say you wanted to get close to these creatures. It doesn't get a lot closer than that.
But what about your skin? Did it peel off or do you still have your skin on?
I still have all, I mean all my skin was intact. Following each of these episodes out on the water, people who were blasted full on in the face also were fine. So yeah, I mean, the only thing that comes to mind is, I guess it seems possible that someone could have in some sort of an allergic reaction to something in the whale spout, But I've never heard it as actually occurring.
Yeah, it seems to be based on everything I've read that You're right. I could not find any evidence that what comes out of a whales blowhole is actually poisonous or acrid to the point that it will burn your skin away. But we can still come back to this, and I don't know, maybe at least try to investigate anything we can figure out about the claim itself, despite the fact that it seems obviously not true.
Right, let's get into the basic science of whale spout or whale blow. What is whale blow Well, it's discussed by Mark Carwardine in the Handbook of Whales, Dolphins, and Porpoises, an excellent that I referred to several times in our previous series on the gray whale. Whale blow or whale spout refers to both the whale's act of breathing explosive exhalation followed by immediate inhalation, and also it refers to the visible misty cloud that hangs in the air afterwards. Quote condensed water, a fine spray of mucus from inside the lungs, and seawater trapped in the blowholes. And I think this was one of the main reasons that I did take a little extra care to avoid staring down over the side of the boat at a blowhole because I did not want to be sneezed full on in the face by one of these leviathans. But I was not deathly afraid of it and fearful of my sight.
Well, sure, and you might want to avoid that, not just because of the forcefulness of the blow but for another I mean, one of the same reasons you wouldn't want a human to sneeze in your face, which is that like when somebody sneezes that mucus might contain significant loading of bacteria, and yeah, you don't know what that's going to be.
Yeah, Yeah, So I avoided it, but I also didn't feel bad about I certainly got plenty of the mist on me, because if you have multiple gray whales in your vicinity, you're just in a cloud of the stuff. So it's unavoidable. Yeah, so, you know, breaking it down to brass tax here the obvious whales. Of course, as we've stated aquatic mammals, they have to come to the surface to breathe, but hold their breath while underwater, and according to Hammondadol in the book Whales Their Biology and Behavior. Whales consciously control their breathing, unlike most mammals who are reflex breathers. Like us. They breathe through their blowholes, which are sometimes called their nares, which are essentially evolved nostrils which can be muscularly opened and closed. And as the authors point out quote, the air pressure in the nasal passage is higher than the ambient pressure at the surface, leading to the explosive release of air from the blowhole. The exhaled air from the whales inside is warmer than the surrounding air and carries moisture, which condenses into the visible blow that so often is the first tell tale sign of a whale. Now, as we've discussed in the show before, baileen whales have two holes, while toothed whales have only one. Baileane whales also have a raised blowhole with a frontal splash guard. It's the explosive exhalation and quick inhalation takes a mere second in the smaller whales in just a few seconds in the giant, so there's a real economy of breathing. In all of this, you come up to the surface and Contrary to a lot of the illustrations of whales, their whole head does not come up. I mean, they can do some of this, but it's not necessary for breathing. All they have to do is just get the top of their head that little blowhole above the water. To pull this off in a manner of seconds. And according to the National Marine Life Center, just one exhalation pretty much empties a whale's entire lungs. One of our exhalations only empties part of our lungs.
Now, this is an interesting fact that I thought was worth looking at a little bit deeper, this thing about whale lungs and capacity and the extent to which that capacity is used. So I started thinking about the comparison to underwater breath holding in humans. Most people who have no special training can comfortably hold their breath underwater for about a minute. I've seen estimates ranging from like one to two minutes to thirty to ninety seconds. I don't know if that depends on how old the population you're looking at is, or you know, how physically fit they are, but still, you know, the average person is not going to be able to stay under that long. Maybe a couple of minutes. Now with conditioning, humans can stay under water a lot longer. I was actually I was trying to find the current human record for underwater breath holding, and according to Guinness World Records, the record holder is a Croatian man named Budimir Shobot, who on March twenty seventh, twenty twenty one, stayed underwater for twenty four minutes and thirty seven seconds. And at first I was like, wait a second, that just cannot be correct. That is too long. That is more than two full playthroughs of the album length version, not the single version of I'd Do Anything for Love, but I won't do that. Can't imagine it. And to some degree my instincts were confirmed because I realized there's a big caveat here. Showbots record and many other people who compete for this particular record. This was for a special category of breath holding oxygen assisted voluntary breath holding. So in this category, before you go under the water, you can spend up to thirty minutes ventilating with one hundred percent pure oxygen from a tank. So this is a pre dive hyperventilation process to like superoxygenate your body. Of course, one hundred percent pure oxygen's much higher than the the content in the air. We normally breathe at twenty one percent oxygen. So yeah, the people who do this, they are super oxygenating their body before they start. And also, of course this guy was highly trained. He spent more than three years training six days a week. So twenty four and a half minutes is the record for this technology assisted hyper ventilation category. But I was trying to find the not technology assisted version, and I found a twenty twenty three article by a University of Windsor kinesiologist named Anthony Bain, and he writes that the record for breath holding if you don't pregame with pure oxygen, is less than half that It is possibly eleven minutes and thirty five seconds for men, which is a record held by Stefan Mifsud. Though there's some dispute about this one because there's also a guy named Bronco Petrovitch who holds a record accredited by Guinness, but not by this other organization, a governing body called the International Association for the Development of Apnea, which aparently does some kind of certification of these records. And I don't want to get drawn into a knife fight about which record is legitimate. But let's just say the unassisted record for men is somewhere between the eleven to twelve minute range, and the record for women is nine minutes and two seconds, held by Natalia Mulkanova.
Yeah, we don't want to make any enemies of people who can hold their breath this long.
That does sound dangerous. Just as a side note, speaking of people who can hold their breath a shockingly long time. This article also mentioned something I hadn't heard of at all, Apparently in preparation for the filming of Avatar Too, The Way of Water. The actress Kate Winslet trained in underwater breath holding for several weeks, and on set she was able to stay underwater for more than seven minutes, something that I am sure, no matter how much I trained, I could not do. She did this on camera too, and you can watch a video of it. When she pops up at the end, she asks, am I dead? So hat's off to Kate?
Wow.
By the way, did you see Way of Water? I haven't seen it yet. I did.
Yeah. My family and I just doing the holidays. It was super cold. One morning we got up and saw a morning showing of Avatar two, complete with coffee and multiple bathroom breaks because it's super long. But yeah, it's fun and it's got space whales in it, so that's kind of neat.
You know.
There are some whales that can stay underwater without breathing longer than we can go in a movie without a bathroom break, at least when there's coffee involved. Yes, But while that is individual records, there are also there are whole cultures of people who regularly do extended underwater free diving and standard for a long period of time. I was looking at one study quickly just to mention by Ilardo at All published in the journal Cell in twenty eighteen called Physiological and Genetic adaptations to Diving in see Nomads, and this study was examining adaptations in the Sama people also known as the Bajoo, a nomadic sea living people of Southeast Asia who are well known for their amazing free diving skills. In some cases they spend several hours a day underwater, not continuously, but they will stay under continuously for minutes at a time while free diving to retrieve things from below, and this is part of been part of their culture for thousands of years. And so this study did some genomic and anatomical analysis of these people to see, well, you know, the free diving skill is common in their culture, do they typically have any differences that assist in that And the study did find, quote, using a comparative genomic study, we showed that natural selection on genetic variants in the PDE one zero a gene have increased spleen size in the bajow, providing them with a larger reservo are of oxygenated red blood cells. We also find evidence of strong selections specific to the bajau on bdk RB two a gene affecting the human diving reflex. And so they say that people living in this culture have developed specific adaptations for hypoxia tolerance, for being better at going longer with holding the breath underwater. But anyway, to come back to this sort of untrained natural human range of people who don't practice diving commonly, you know, it's maybe like one to two minutes on average, more like nine to twelve minutes at the extreme. Some whale species, on the other hand, have, in extreme cases, as we said, been observed to stay under the surface for hours. And while that might not be normal. It's normal for whales to stand or for longer than the unassisted record for humans. It's commonly cited that sperm whales can stay under for ninety minutes while hunting. So the question is how do they do this? You might naturally assume the answer is that the whales have bigger lungs. They can take a deeper breath hold in more air because they've got bigger lungs. But actually that's not the case. The strange thing is, relative to body size, whales have significantly smaller lungs than humans. Human lungs are roughly seven percent of body size on average, but whale lungs can be less than half that, at about three percent of body size.
That's fascinating, that's a great point.
Yeah, so how does that work the standard for like movie length times while having lungs that are relatively smaller than ours. So I was reading about this in a book called The Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals edited by burned In Puran from Academic Press two thousand and nine, and there was a chapter on breathing in marine mammals by the marine biologist Douglas Wartsock. And here's where we come back to what you said right about the relative difference in how much the lung can empty. This concerns a biological metric known as the tidal volume. Tidal volume is the amount of air that is inhaled and exhaled during normal respiration. It turns out most animals do not completely empty and refill their lungs with each breath. Instead, they're always exchanging some fractional percentage of the gas in their lungs for fresh air from the outside. What percentage of the total lung capacity is exchanged with each breath varies by species, and I guess probably also would vary with individual animals too, but there are certainly species differences and there are trends with groups of animals. According to Wartsock, the tidal volume is a bigger percentage of the animal's total lung capacity when you're looking at marine mammals than when you're looking at terrestrial mammals. So you look at an average terrestrial mammal, horses, humans, whatever tidal volume is going to be something like ten to fifteen percent of total lung capacity. Meanwhile, for marine mammals, and this would include not just whales but other marine mammals, pinnip heads and so forth. Average tidal volume is much higher, usually more than seventy five percent of total lung capacity, so many multiples beyond the depth of gas exchange that we accomplish when we breathe. For sea mammals like whales, breathing in and out is just a more dramatic activity. They're emptying and refilling to a near total extent. And that's just for normal respiration. For what works out calls vital capacity. Essentially the maximum title volume you're capable of when you're like really breathing in and out as deeply as you can. That rarely exceeds seventy five percent of lung capacity in land based mammals, but marine mammals can go higher than ninety percent. So even though again whales might have smaller lungs relative to body size, they can like almost totally collapse that lung to exhale and then reinflate the lung totally is like huge exchange of gas. And the question would be what makes that difference. Why would marine mammals have the ability to sort of crush out their lungs like that, Well, we can't really do the same thing. Wartzok says, quote, Marine mammal lungs contain more elastic tissue than those of terrestrial mammals. The ribs contain more cartilage and are thus more compliant than those of terrestrial mammals. The lung is also more compliant. Marine mammal lungs can collapse and reinflate repeatedly, whereas in terrestrial mammals, lung collapses a serious situation that requires intervention to reinflate. Although both terrestrial mammals and marine mammals inspire actively and expire passively, so there's active working of a muscle to breathe in and then relaxing of the muscle to breathe out. Quote. The features noted earlier allow much greater elastic recoil of the lungs, chest, cavity, and diaphragm, and thus a greater tidal volume in proportion to total lung capacity. So he's almost painting a picture of whale lungs as this kind of I don't know, like like super elastic balloon or is something that just kind of like springs back and forth. And I know this isn't biologically accurate, but to my mind, I was thinking about with this, like, you know, naturally collapsing lung that's just part of the breathing process. It's almost in my brain like a whoope cushion being sat on every time the whale breathes out.
Yeah, I mean all of this. I think it brings up something that is at once obvious about the whale and also you know, a lot more sublime in many ways as well. And that is, of course, is that when you look back at what whales may have looked like, what their bodies may have been like when they were land based organisms, or their their ancestors were, and you look at their forms now, it's like they have changed so much, they have evolved so much to become these masters of the ocean, and there are all these various features like this where it's just it's just absolutely alarming when you look closer, even though I mean very obviously this is the nature of the whale, when you just look at even just a basic sketch of their anatomy.
Yes, absolutely, I mean this once eons ago quadrupedal mammal that lived an ever increasing amount of its life in the water and eventually became a fully marine organism and now one of its adaptations is that its lungs almost completely collapse when it breathes out and create this forceful burst of exhalation that is, in the end what we see when the whale, when the whale spouts, or when the blowhole opens, and it can be incredibly powerful when the lung collapses. Wartsock writes, quote in gray whale calves, the duration of expiration and inhalation is closer to half a second, but the tidal volume can be as great as sixty two liters and the maximum flow rate is as great as two hundred and two leaders per second. Gas flows through the external nares at speeds of forty four meters per second during inspiration and two hundred meters per second during expiration, and that also he emphasizes how efficient the breathing process is, saying that like the breathing out usually begins before the whale actually even breaks the surface of the water, so it's like they're coming up to break the surface, and then before they reach the surface, the exhale starts, so it blasts, and then that might create some of the water. You actually see another part of what appears to be water coming out of the blowhole is the condensing of the vapor from the lung, but then it's over the surface for just a little bit of time. It uses that time while it's out to breathe in suddenly and then it goes back under.
Yeah. In my experiences out there with the gray whales too, the Yeah, it's depending on when they're releasing their exhalation. If they're releasing it when the blowhole is above or mostly above the surface of the water, that creates one type of spout. But if they release it underneath the water by even say, you know, a few inches or more, you're going to have even more water coming up. It's going to be even more of a of a of what feels like a fountain to the face or to the side of the boat.
Now, one last thing I wanted to mention about why whales can stay under so long. Actually first came across this and just an interesting informational video by a marine ecologist to the University of New South Whales named Professor Tracy Rogers, and this was pointing out, in addition to stuff about the lungs, the capacity of cetaceans to just store more oxygen in their body tissues, so beyond what gas the lungs are capable of holding the storage of oxygen in the hemoglobin in red blood cells. You know, both humans and whales. Marine mammals and terrestrial mammals store oxygen in the hemoglobin, but whales have much more hemoglobin in their blood, which is one reason that their blood might appear darker red than the blood of terrestrial mammals. I don't know if you've ever seen whale blood, but I feel like I have noticed this before that it comes out so dark red it almost looks kind of like black or purple.
I suppose I've seen it in documentaries. Yeah.
Yeah. But also whales simply have more blood relative to their body size than than terrestrial mammals generally do, and they have more myoglobin in their muscles to store oxygen, as well as other adaptations that just have to do with how the body of the whale uses oxygen once it is submerged, So it has adaptations that can say, turn off delivery of oxygen to certain body systems that are not necessarily being used at the moment while the whale is deeply submerged. So if it's you know, a deep underwater hunting and it's not going to come up for a while. It might sort of reduce oxygen usage of its digestive system or something like that.
Now, we've discussed how the ancestors of whales had frontal nostrils at the ends of their snouts before on the show, and how the nostrils travel up to the top of the head over the course of their evolution, you know, becoming the blowhole. We can see evidence of this journey and fossil remains, and we can also see this movement in their fetal development. We can watch the blowhole move up the face and head. I believe we mostly discuss the energy efficiency of a snout breather having to bring the whole head up as opposed to the top of the head, and Hammond dett All also point out that this positioning definitely shades down the breathing time over the course of evolution. So all they have to do, they don't have to bring the snout up to breathe. All they have to do is just get the blowhole itself above the surface of the water. And like we've been saying in so many changes, I mean, the whale is a creature that has just been completely transformed by its journey into and its mastery of the ocean over the course of its evolution, and you can there's so many examples of this, but one that came up is this that they have no facial sinuses, presumably to avoid complications with diving. Anyone out there if you're a diver, and you may know some of the complications that can occur if you say clogged your sinuses are clogged up or something like that. Even if you're flying, you can sometimes encounter problems with this, and so this is a this is just one problem that the whale has eliminated through its evolution. Now, coming back to the visible spout of the whale, the blow of the whale, as one would see from a distance that ar she blows. It's it's worth noting that it's this is something that Mark Carbadine discusses in the Hambook of Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises. The blow or the spout of a whale is very distinctive with larger whales, and it can be categorized by height, shape, and visibility. And that's not to say it's easy to do. There's an art to it. An experienced whale watcher has to take into account various factors such as wind, rain, air temperature, light quality, which can all of these can you know, distort the shape of the spout or the degree to which the spout is visible. And also we have to take into account that the first spout after a long dive tends to be far stronger, which I think we can we can sort of relate to that. I mean, that's kind of our experience of breathing after holding one's breath for a period of time. Also, individual whale size is going to play a role in all of this, and also behavior of an individual whale will also be a factor. Still, if you know what you're doing, you can make out the species of a great whale, especially at a distance. To give a few basic examples of note here and Joe, I sent you some snapshot of some of the illustrations from Carlodiane's book to look at in your email there. But the gray whale, which we discussed in previous episodes, is known for its heart shaped plume up to five meters. The sperm whale is also known for its spout. It has a single blowhole spout off to the side up to six meters. The blue whale spout is a single vertical plume of up to twelve meters. Then the North Atlantic right whale is interesting like other right whales, it has two spouts, one off to either side up to seven meters. And then with the orca, which of course discussed at length in our gray whale series, up to five meters, bushy at the top and projected slightly forward.
Yeah, these illustrations are lovely and they do almost kind of look like silhouettes of different tree species that you would identify like that, you know, oh, that's the maple and that's the.
Spruce, right right. So any any book you have, particular and in particular the Handbook of Whales, Dolphins and porposes, Yeah, it has pages of these where you can compare them. But then also each species profiled in the book there is they have this image of what it's spout would basically look like. Again, you'd have to take into account some of these factors though. All right, Well, on that note, we're going to go ahead and close out this episode. Well, but we'll be back for a part two on all of this. I believe this will be a two parter, so come back on Thursday. We have more to discuss more on this whole idea that the that the Herman Melville's talking about, that a whale spout is going to burn your skin off, poison you, and blind you. Will see what some contemporary critics we're saying about all of that, and we'll get into some other areas surrounding whale spout. In the meantime, if you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, including checking out that multi part series we did on the Gray Whale and it's travels its relationship with the Orcas, you can find that in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Some Mondays we do a listener mail, on Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster fact, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com.
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