With a lot of ingenuity and a little luck, researchers monitored the heart rate of a blue whale in the wild.
With a lot of ingenuity and a little luck, researchers monitored the heart rate of a blue whale in the wild. The measurement suggests that blue whale hearts are operating at extremes – and may limit the whale’s size.
Encased in a neon orange plastic shell, a collection of electronic sensors bobbed along the surface of the Monterey Bay, waiting to be retrieved by Stanford University researchers. A lunchbox-sized speck in the vast waters, it held cargo of outsized importance: the first-ever recording of a blue whale’s heart rate.
This device was fresh off a daylong ride on Earth’s largest species – a blue whale. Four suction cups had secured the sensor-packed tag near the whale’s left flipper, where it recorded the animal’s heart rate through electrodes embedded in the center of two of the suction feet. The details of this tag’s journey and the heart rate it delivered were published Nov. 25 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Read more at: Stanford University
Researchers from the Goldbogen Lab place a suction-cup tag on a blue whale in Monterey Bay. (Photo Credit: Goldbogen Lab/Duke Marine Robotics and Remote Sensing Lab; NMFS Permit 16111)
