6/13/2023 0 Comments Big blue blocks of poo poo![]() “Another image supplied by Gorter from “Southern Blue and Fin Whales” by N.A. But by the time the drawing was made, the whale had already started to decompose, making for a larger than normal orifice. The scale bar, which according to Gorter likely measures in 10cm increments, indicates that an anal opening around 15-20cm. Dubar, plate 13 shows a detailed drawing of a 25 meter long female blue whale’s vulva and anus. In Ostéographie de la baleine échouée à l'est du port d'Ostende le 4 novembre 1827, a book published in 1828 by J. But one source suggests they could be bigger. So just how big is a blue whale’s anus? Leslie and Pyenson, independently arrive near the same estimate: around 10-15 centimeters, like a large grapefruit. Unlike wombats or horses or humans, their poops are not full of woody fiber and so resemble liquidy jello. Blue whales are baleen whales, and feed by straining tiny shrimp-like animals called krill from massive amounts of ocean water. Blue whale anuses likely aren’t huge because what they eat is tiny. She notes that blue whales also have relatively small brains for their body size. Dara Orbach, an assistant professor of Marine Biology at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, but that is not always true. The meme likely assumes that animal anus scales with animal size says Dr. It's much more diffuse, kind of like fuzzy, almost fleecy.” “To put it bluntly,” Gorter says, “no turds.” ![]() “It’s not like floating logs in the ocean. In Pyenson and Savoca’s pictures, yellow-gold, salmony-pink, and coppery brown feces plume behind the whales for several feet “Their poop is not like ours” Pyenson says. The Stool Scale is a quasi-quantitative rating system that in this case offers us a more visceral understanding of the quality of poo a whale’s anus is responsible for. Type 5-6 then lands somewhere between “soft blobs with clear-cut edges,” and fluffy, raggedy edged bits. It ranges from Type 1-hard, nut-like poos-to Type 7, which is pure liquid. The Bristol Stool Scale, in case you are not familiar, was developed in 1997 by the Bristol Royal Infirmary as a tool to help patients and their clinicians better communicate fecal appearance and consistency. Matthew Savoca, have studied whale defecation and hope to publish their research soon “The whale poop I have been around typically is a five or six on the Bristol Stool Scale so it's not as though they're passing blocks the size of a refrigerator or something,” Savoca says. Nick Pyenson, curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian and author of Spying on Whales, and Stanford University biology postdoctoral fellow Dr. ![]() Fortunately, poop research is non-invasive and legal. Now an anus is the end of a poop chute, and from an engineering perspective, the size of the anus is directed by the size of its contents. (Males have two slits: one each for the anal opening and the penis.) Today few of these giants are left, so we can view this measure as a whale butthole upper bound. That slit covers both her genitalia and anus, and while whalers “didn't spend a lot of time fishing around inside of the slits,” he says, they did take measurements from the anus to the clitoris, or the length of the slit, which for the largest whales measured four to five feet. “If you were to just take a blue whale and roll it over-as if that were easy to do-the female is going to have a slit, like right at the base of her tail,” Leslie says. Though whalers sometimes did note an especially impressive penis. There was-and still is- simply no interest in documenting its absolute size, or its capacity for super flatulence.” Whalers were much more concerned with how much blood, meat, and blubber the whale could provide. Marine mammal illustrator and American Cetacean Society President Uko Gorter agrees, “The rectum or anus of whales escaped scientific scrutiny for centuries. “And to be honest,” Leslie says, “there wasn't a whole lot of interest in anuses.” ![]() And by “a lot” Leslie refers to a whaling industry that killed hundreds of thousands of blue whales, likely restructured marine ecosystems, and nearly drove them extinct. Matt Leslie, a visiting assistant professor of biology at Swarthmore College. “Most of the data that we have on large whale species comes from back in the day when we used to kill a lot of them,” says Dr. Once convinced our request was not a joke, the situation improved only slightly. One admitted that at first, he assumed his colleagues were messing with him. The first obstacle getting an answer to these pressing questions was persuading scientists to answer interview requests. Naturally, our next thought was, “Is this true?” and “How big is a blue whale’s anus, anyway?" When we saw the memes scoring the size of a blue whale’s anus second to some of the year’s most reviled politicians, our first thought was that it was deliciously funny. Jeff Gritchen/Orange County Register reader comments 177 with ![]()
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