Scientists measure blue whale's heart rate using electrocardiogram machine

Scientists have measured the heart rate of the world's largest creature using an orange electrocardiogram machine attached with suction cups to the body of a blue whale. The blue whale basically can reach up to 100 feet long and weigh 200 tons. It plummets its heart rate to as little as two beats per minute as it dives under the ocean surface for food, according to the researchers. The maximum heart rate they have recorded was 37 beats per minute after the mammal returned to the surface from a foraging dive.

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Larger animals has lower heart rate

Marine biologist Jeremy Goldbogen of Stanford University said that the blue whale is considered to be the largest animal of all time and has fascinated the biologists for a long time. Goldbogen added that new measures of vital rates and physiological rates help us understand how animals work at the upper extreme of body mass. The larger the animal, the lower is the heart rate which minimizes the amount of work the heart does while circulating blood around the body. The normal human resting heart rate ranges from about 60 to 100 beats per minute. The smallest mammals have heart rates of about a thousand beats per minute.

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The researchers came up with a device that contained an electrocardiogram machine to monitor a whale’s heartbeat in the open ocean. The device had four suction cups to enable them to attach it to the whale non-invasively. The researchers obtained data for nine hours from an adult male whale about 72 feet long encountered in Monterey Bay off California’s coast. The blue whales despite their large size, feed on tiny prey. They take a huge amount of water into their mouths. The mammals exhibited extremely low heart rates typically of four to eight beats per minute and as low as two. The exercise of constant diving increases the heart rates of the whale around 25 to 37 beats per minute.

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