Do baleen whales accidentally eat jellyfish or other poisonous/stinging animals? If so, why is that not a problem for them?
Posted by Specialist_Lion_7521@reddit | whales | View on Reddit | 13 comments
Couldn't find an answer to this anywhere on the internet... as I understand, baleen whales feeding behavior necessitates that they kind of indiscriminately fill their mouth with a bunch of small creature laden water, then they push the water out past the baleen, then swallow the solids. The ocean however, is host to a whole lot of poisonous and venomous creatures, with all sorts of spines, barbs, nematocysts ect... so why is this never an issue for baleen whales? Are they actually very selective in when they choose to take a gulp? Or are most of the venomous creatures not usually occupying the feeding zones for whales? In particular, jellyfish or manowars definitely end up in the same places whales feed and are all venomous and hard to see...it seems certain that a whale would occasionally eat some. Are they so big that the inflammation in their guts just doesn't matter? Does stomach acid quickly inactivate nematocysts or something?
And lets imagine for a moment that one accidentally ate a pufferfish (which apparently has enough venom to kill 30 humans)... now a baleen whale weighs much more than 30 humans but what if they ate several? Are pufferfish just never going to be swimming around in the open ocean where whales usually feed?
Specialist_Lion_7521@reddit (OP)
I cannot believe this, but after learning that the weight of a full grown blue whale is half a million pounds, my intuition is telling me that they are just so absolutely massive that normal venoms might not reach lethal doses??? I'm gonna use the pufferfish metric again even though it might be ridiculous, but if a pufferfish has enough venom to kill 30 humans, and a blue whale weighs as much as 3000 humans, it would need to eat 100 pufferfish for a lethal dose, (assuming 100% of the toxin makes it into the whales blood)... are they TOO BIG to be bothered by venoms and toxins??? I'm like, comparing this to something like spiders in my head now... the same spider venom that will liquify a bugs insides just makes a red bump on my skin when they bite me because i'm so much bigger... is the same phenomena going on here?
Anen-o-me@reddit
What's even weirder is that large whales appear to be immune to cancer and we don't know why. You'd think larger animals would have an enormous problem with cancer, but actually they seem to be immune.
They're so large that the body seems to defend against cancers by simply cutting of the blood supply to that entire area and letting everything die off and rebuild after, which isn't a viable strategy in smaller animals.
Akzaar@reddit
Also apparently their cancers destroy themselves giving themselves cancer (as in different strains from different mutations compete with each other) before they can reach a damaging enough mass
buon_natale@reddit
Blue whales only weigh about 200,000-350,000 lbs when fully grown!
cmj3@reddit
Even record-holders are speculated to weigh closer to ~440,000 lbs
ltlbunnyfufu@reddit
They are mainly feeding in large schools of krill and fish that don’t hang out on the bottom like pufferfish, and aren’t intermixed with jellies. Given that they have recently accidentally swallowed kayakers, and we know that they swallow ocean plastic and fishing line all the time, they probably accidentally swallow just about everything. The occasional seagull etc. Body mass and the lack of tastebuds probably mean that the poisonous creatures don’t have as much impact as the ocean plastics and fishing lines.
dontknow16775@reddit
Wait they dont have tastebuds?
_Apatosaurus_@reddit
Only for salt!
Still-Ambassador2283@reddit
Wtf ..why?! Thats the one thing they don't need to taste for!!!
Anen-o-me@reddit
Tasting salinity will give them some sense of how close to the coast they are, how close to a fresh water source. Might aid in navigation, they would be able to taste rivers flowing into the ocean as they travel past them etc. Their prey might prefer a certain salinity and ocean quality. Plus being in the polar regions you get less salty water too.
Still-Ambassador2283@reddit
Valid points! Thanks for the info.
ratelbadger@reddit
Can they smell?
splashes-in-puddles@reddit
Probably not! They lack that part of the brain though there was a paper recently suggesting they might be able to smell certain chemicals krill produce.