WINSTON WEEKLY^[1]

February 15, 2026

Vol. 4, No. 7

A WHALE OF A HEART[2]

With arteries the diameter of a dinner plate, blue whales have the world’s biggest heart at nearly 400 pounds and five feet in length. Sonar can detect a blue whale’s heartbeat from nearly two miles away. Below the surface, a blue whale’s heartbeat slows to two to ten beats per minute to conserve oxygen. Their heartbeat increases to 25 to 37 beats per minute when above the surface.

A fully preserved blue whale heart is on display at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada. Extracted from a whale that washed ashore in Newfoundland in 2014, it was preserved using a technique in which water and fat were replaced with plastic polymers. A life-side model created by the Human Dynamo Workshop in New Zealand is displayed at the Ocean Institute in Dana Point, California. The New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts is also home to a model heart, along with a half-scale model of a whaling ship, whaling logbooks, and many more whaling artifacts.

More than 300,000 blue whales existed little more than a century ago. Now an endangered species with a population between 10,000 and 25,000, some are nearly 100 feet long and 330,000 pounds or 165 tons. Elephants pale in comparison at 4.5 tons. An adult blue whale consumes nearly four tons of krill a day. Even at birth, blue whales are massive at 25 feet in length and 8,800 pounds. Their weight increases by nearly 200 pounds per day, consuming between 50 to 150 gallons of fat-rich milk daily. Once weaned, they consume 12,000 pounds of krill a day.

WEEKLY ACTIVITY

Explore more facts about blue whales, including: 1) their average life span; 2) their primary waters; 3) their social customs; and 4) what they can teach us about the planet.

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[1] A weekly blog/newsletter by Alysen Bayles to be shared with the appropriate attribute.

[2] Resources: The Heart of a Giant, www.oceaninstitute.org; www.whalingmuseum.org; www.oceaninstitute.org; Leigh Calvez, The Breath of a Whale: The Science and Spirit of Pacific Ocean Giants, Sasquatch Books, Feb. 26, 2019; Jenni Desmond, The Blue Whale, Enchanted Lion Books, 2015.