How comes blue whales dont get more attention
They are the biggest animals ever to exist and yet nobody really talks about them
Hard to study and what is there to talk about?
Filter feeders overall are incredibly uninteresting.
It's a floating lump.
is it the most efficiently designed animal?
>>2054478
isn't it unnecessary smart?
>>2054715
my opinion on whales is the same as elephants where they are smart by virtue of having huge brains more so than well designed complex ones
like their intelligence stems from raw processing power instead of efficient design like ours
>>2054742
It's not like huge animals need large brains. They have it for some reason, an animal doesn't just keep a giant incredibly expensive organ for no reason.
>>2054408
Their dorsal fin isn't centered. I don't like them.
>>2054742
Efficient design is easy to fuck up though.
Schizophrenia after all.
>>2054759
I always wondered, what advantage does it have to have the dorsal fin so close to their tails?
>>2054771
I'm sure if we sanded it flat it wouldn't make a difference
>>2054769
that isn't caused by efficient design, it's caused by the cats that you own.
>>2054779
easier to go sideways with those.
>>2054408
I mean, they're cool and all. I like Whale Songs, I think they sound legit.
But that's pretty much it. They just float around everywhere. Maybe if we got video of Blue Whales fucking each other up, or fighting off some other shit...then maybe we've have something more to say. But in general...they're just kind of there. Big, relatively peaceful monoliths.
>>2054408
Are they really the largest animals to ever exist?
I find that very hard to believe when you considered dinosaurs and other creatures existed for millions of years.
Overall though, i like them.
They're cries are beautiful and enchanting.
>>2055003
>Are they really the largest animals to ever exist?
hard to say since we keep finding larger and larger dinosaurs, but so far blue whales would seem to be the largest vertebrates in both weight and length.
>>2055007
Several species, both living and extinct, surpass the blue whale in length, but it remains unmatched in terms of weight/mass.
>>2055007
Hmm interesting.
I always thought that claim was false since dinosaurs are huge.
Plus, there's that whole thing that's supposed to be the ancestor of sharks, ¿megalodon?.
Still cool to know though.
>>2055013
>>2055007
To follow up,
http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/the-titanosaur
> a 122-foot-long dinosaur. This species is so new that it has not yet been formally named by the paleontologists who discovered it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion%27s_mane_jellyfish
> At 37 m (120 ft) in length, the largest known specimen was longer than a blue whale and is considered one of the longest known animals in the world.
>>2055015
Megalododon was no larger than a large sperm whale. I remember a paper last year that hypothesized that megalododon's extinction allowed for today's giant whale species to evolve.
Pic related for lack of a better pic
>>2055023
>>2055015
Found it
>>2055024
>>2055015
Also, even though whales are the biggest, dinosaurs were still pretty fucking huge
>>2054792
kek
In some ways I find enormous land animals more impressive than buoyancy-supported whales because of the challenges that come with being able to support such enormous weight on land. Sauropods had incredible anatomical systems to keep everything working, like pneumatic bones and tendons that acted like suspension bridges. It's incredible that something this massive could not only live on land, but actually went on to become one of the most successful groups of species in history.
>>2055003
definetely the heaviest. Even the largest dinosaurs would still weight 1/3 of a whale as being a land animals is quite restrictive
>>2054800
I was watching Life and they somehow made fights between humpback whales pretty intense. It was probably the music, but seeing them jump, spin and try to crush each other was pretty cool too.
>>2055013
>Image is not to scale at all.
>It makes itself look like it is.
Why would you do this to me?
>>2055023
>Predator X
>>2055898
Whales were once land mammals though.
>>2056722
nowhere near this size tho
>>2056569
now Pliosaurus funkei
>>2056722
goes from 1 meter land mammal to 200 ton filter feeder... looking at that its.. it preety darn impressive
>>2054749
while they may have a large brain, there's too much whale to reserve some of it for higher forms of thought, their tongues literally weigh a ton. It's all about the brain/body ratio
Think of the giant cheeses you could make if you could milk a whale.
>>2054749
arent dino and rhino brain laughably small?
>>2057454
rhino brain is hundreds of times larger than non-avian dino brains.
a 20 foot long Allosaurus had a brain almost exactly the same size and shape as your thumb.
Pic related, the red there is about the size and shape of T. rex's brain. The yellow is the bone around the brain, the braincase.
>>2057456
Either your hands are the size of shreks or your sizing in the picture is off.
bcoz tiny is mighty
>>2057473
That's a 40 foot T. rex, not a 20 foot Allosaurus.
>>2054792
you're more likely to get toxoplasmosis from food than from a cat
>>2057701
E.Q. isn't just a simple brain:body mass ratio.
it's arbitrarily weighted for what we'd "expect" an animal's brain:body ratio to be.
in other words we adjust encephalization quotient up or down based on comparison to related animals and based on prejudices about an animal's intelligence and behavior.
if we didn't make these little adjustments we'd run into problems like e.q. predicting that mice are more intelligent than humans. Something Douglas Adams always suspected.
>>2055023
this picture triggers me in so many ways
>>2055003
I find it hard to believe no other aquatic creature in ancient history couldn't have grown larger, but so far we haven't found fossils of any creature that matches the sheer bulk of modern whales
even past fossils indicate that ancient whales were much smaller, which makes sense since they evolved from land creatures into aquatic
I'm willing to bet that there has probably been some very large jellies and cephalopods but who knows
>>2056768
>funkei
marvelous name desu