Record holder of deep — sea dives: who is he?

For a long time it was believed that the title of the record holder for diving to the depth belongs to the largest of the toothed whales, the only modern representative of the sperm whale family.

Adult male sperm whales reach 20 meters in length and a mass of 50 tons, and females - 15 meters in length and a mass of 20 tons. For comparison, the length of a passenger car of a long-distance train is 16.08 meters, and the weight without passengers is 7.4 tons. 

Accordingly, the weight of a male sperm whale is comparable to a small train of 6 wagons, but let's go back to diving.

The maximum diving depth of a sperm whale in search of food is about 600 meters. And the maximum recorded diving depth is 1800 meters. At the same time, the sperm whale holds its breath for about 90 minutes. And this is an amazing indicator.

However, these data were obtained from whalers, whose professional activity cannot be called scientific in any way. Therefore, scientists decided to refute dubious information and studied elephant seals - mammals of the seal family.

The male elephant seal can reach sizes up to 6.5 meters, and the female up to 3.5 meters. The weight of an adult is approximately 4 tons. And let the sea elephants lose to the sperm whale in size by external signs, it turned out that in search of food they not only hold their breath for 120 minutes, but also dive 2000 meters, while the sperm whale holds its breath for half an hour less, diving 200 meters shorter.

An important clarification: marine life, of course, sometimes dive and lead their way of life at a much deeper depth. But diving is the process of taking air and holding your breath, followed by diving to a depth.

The obtained data on sea elephants only aroused the interest of scientists in finding new "diving rivals" and setting an absolute record. So the Cascadia Research Collective organization has established that the beaked whale is the absolute winner in this competition, because it is able to dive as much as 3 kilometers, while holding its breath for about 140 minutes.

Interesting fact:
Beaked or beaked whales are one of the oldest groups of cetaceans, the oldest fossils of beaked whales date back to the Miocene. The body length of an individual is from 3.4 to 13 meters, the body weight is from 1 to 15 tons.

The study of such a wonderful creature as a beaked whale does not yet provide complete data on all species of the family. Some of them are known to us only by those individuals who, for various reasons, were thrown ashore.

A source:
Wikipedia.org
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