Sep 26, 2026 · 17 min · 22 segments
It's a good question. The blue whale is the largest known animal to ever grace the planet (they may be twice as big as Megalodon was! Their tongues are as heavy as elephants!), but they're still…
In this one, we dip into the amazing lives of blue whales, which are the biggest and one of the loudest animals our world has ever known.
Dating back to the days of woolly mammoths, humans have been obsessed with larger-than-life mammals.
And on the aquatic front, there's no bigger mammal than the blue whale, which is the largest known animal to ever grace the planet.
No evidence has been found that any other creature, even the largest of dinosaurs, surpassed the blue whale in size.
But wait, what about the megalodon, the extinct shark species believed to be the largest fish on the planet, and which you may recall from the 2018 horror movie The Meg? Well, scientists guess that even the biggest megalodon only reached a mere fifty-eight feet in length, though some argue it was up to eighty-two feet.
By contrast, the largest blue whales clock in at a little more than a hundred feet or thirty meters long, and on average are between seventy and ninety feet in length.
That's a hundred and eighty-one thousand kilograms or about two hundred tons.
A blue whale's heart is the size of a car, its eye is the size of a basketball, and a small child could swim through its arteries.
The spray from a blue whale's blowhole is almost as tall as a three-story building.
These aptly named whales are blue-gray in color with lighter gray patches that resemble splotches of paint, though they also go by sulfur-bottom whale due to their yellowish underbelly.
The blue whale is part of the baleen whale family, a group of toothless whales.
It has, instead of teeth, plates of thick, coarse bristles in its mouth that it uses to catch food.
These are called black baleen or whale bone, and a single whale might have up to eight hundred plates of the stuff in its great mouth.
Despite their massive size, blue whales rely on very tiny two-inch crustaceans known as krill as their staple meal.
In this one, we dip into the amazing lives of blue whales, which are the biggest and one of the loudest animals our world has ever known.
Dating back to the days of woolly mammoths, humans have been obsessed with larger-than-life mammals.
And on the aquatic front, there's no bigger mammal than the blue whale, which is the largest known animal to ever grace the planet.
No evidence has been found that any other creature, even the largest of dinosaurs, surpassed the blue whale in size.
But wait, what about the megalodon, the extinct shark species believed to be the largest fish on the planet, and which you may recall from the 2018 horror movie The Meg? Well, scientists guess that even the biggest megalodon only reached a mere fifty-eight feet in length, though some argue it was up to eighty-two feet.
By contrast, the largest blue whales clock in at a little more than a hundred feet or thirty meters long, and on average are between seventy and ninety feet in length.
That's a hundred and eighty-one thousand kilograms or about two hundred tons.
A blue whale's heart is the size of a car, its eye is the size of a basketball, and a small child could swim through its arteries.
The spray from a blue whale's blowhole is almost as tall as a three-story building.
These aptly named whales are blue-gray in color with lighter gray patches that resemble splotches of paint, though they also go by sulfur-bottom whale due to their yellowish underbelly.
The blue whale is part of the baleen whale family, a group of toothless whales.
It has, instead of teeth, plates of thick, coarse bristles in its mouth that it uses to catch food.
These are called black baleen or whale bone, and a single whale might have up to eight hundred plates of the stuff in its great mouth.
Despite their massive size, blue whales rely on very tiny two-inch crustaceans known as krill as their staple meal.
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