The largest heart on earth — a 400-pound blood-pumping machine — beats about 13 times a minute.
That’s according to scientists' first recordings of the heart of a blue whale. The research team documented the rhythms thanks to a few suction cups that kept a heart rate monitor attached to a whale swimming and diving around California's Monterey Bay.
This is the first heart rate recording of any wild large whale, and the biggest one to boot: Blue whales are the largest animals ever known to have lived on Earth. And the recordings might hint at a biological limit for heart size in mammals. Based on their recordings, the researchers believe blue whales' hearts might be just about as big as they come.
It also clues biologists into how the whale accomplishes deep feeding dives, the authors report in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of ...
