Blubber, Part 1

That is Herman Melville's Moby Dick. We've talked about passages from Moby Dick on the show before, often related to whale anatomy, but sometimes on other strange subjects. I know we did a bunch of stuff about Moby Dick when I did an episode with Lauren and Annie of of the podcast Savor on Ambergris or Ambergrise uh, and we talked about Moby Dick when Rob, when you and I did some episodes on whale spout on like what exactly is going on there when you see that you know,

the whale blast, what's coming out? And does it burn the skin? Does it poison people? As alleged and Moby Dick.

other times they're way off. Some of the main observations in this chapter, as we'll discuss are correct, mainly in that Ishmael observes that the whale's body is surrounded by a thick layer of blubber, and that one of the blubber's main purposes is related to insulation the retention of body heat. That's not the only thing that blubber does in marine mammals, but that's a big part of it.

It's one of the most important things it does. So first he marvels at the incredible size and quantity of blubber within the whale, which, in the example of a single sperm whale that he's talking about, boils down into one hundred barrels of oil. He says, one hundred bear of oil from a single whale, and that's not even the entire mass of its outer skin or integument layer. And he says that that gives the mind a hint

of the quote enormousness of that animated mass overall. And he also observes the texture and the makeup of the blubber, which is quote something of the consistence of firm, close grained beef, but tougher, more elastic and compact, and ranges from eight or ten to twelve and fifteen inches in thickness. He also remarks curiously when he's looking at the outer

skin of the sperm whale. He says that the sperm whale's skin is quote all over, obliquely crossed and recrossed, with numberless straight marks in thick array, something like those in the finest Italian line engravings, which he later also compares to Egyptian hieroglyphics. He especially makes the connection to the mysteriousness of the hieroglyphics and the mysteriousness of the

marks the whale's body. I think we now know that this is actually a common thing you do see on the bodies of sperm whales, that they will have lines or sometimes even circular scars over their bodies, which can in part come from battles with the squid they hunt, can come from running into things, butting, fights with other whales, all kinds of scrapings and accidents, maybe sat yes, mating, maybe other contact with fishing equipment or whatever. The whales

can get a lot of scars. And I love thinking of these scars on the outside of the sperm whale skin as like a mysterious language to be deciphered.

in all weathers, in all seas, times and tides. What would become of a greenland whale, say, in those shuddering icy seas of the north, if unsupplied with his cozy surtout. Surtout is a type of coat from the time. By the way, so his cozy surtout true. Other fish are

found exceedingly brisk in those hyperborean waters. But these, be it observed, are your cold blooded, lungless fish, whose very bellies are refrigerators, creatures that warm themselves under the lee of an iceberg, as a traveler in winter would bask before an infire, whereas like man, the whale has lungs and warm blood freeze his blood and he dies. How wonderful it is, then, except after explanation, that this great monster, to whom corporeal warmth is as indispensable as it is

to man. How wonderful that he should be found at home, immersed to his lips for life in those Arctic waters. And then a little later he says, it does seemed to me that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh man, admire and model thyself after the whale. Do thou too remain warm among ice? Do thou too live in this world

without being of it? Be cool at the equator, Keep thy blood fluid at the pole, like the great dome of Saint Peter's, and like the great whale. Retain o man, in all seasons a temperature of thine own beautiful.

got me thinking about blubber. So this is chapter eleven, much earlier. It's called night Gown, and the context in the story is that because of overcrowding at a boarding house on Nantucket, Ishmael he's just arrived there and he has been forced to share a room, and not to share a room, to share a bed at the boarding

house with the Polynesian harpooneer quek Weeg. And he's initially much annoyed by these circumstances, but then after some reflection and some experiences together, Ishmael comes to not just tolerate, but admire and even adore quek Weeg, and they become best of friends, in Ishmael's words, a cozy, loving pair on their honeymoon. So in the Nightgown chapter, Ishmael writes of sharing a bed in a blanket at the boarding house with quik Weeg. He says, first they try to sleep,

then they're not able to sleep. And then finally, he says, quote, we became very wakeful, so much so that our recumbent position began to grow wearisome. And by little and little we found ourselves sitting up, the clothes well tucked around us, leaning against the headboard, with our fore knees drawn up close together, and our two noses bending over them, as

if our knee pans were warming pans. We felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors, indeed out of bedclothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold. For there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely.

By contrast, nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and you have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable anymore. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head slightly chilled, why then indeed, in the

general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason, a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie, like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.

I wonder what the sensation of the whale is. You know, it has blubber mostly all around its body, but maybe not fully in the flippers or something. So does it have those little exposures to the iciness around it? What does it feel like to the whale? Does the whale have that sensation in the cold it feels with the flippers or some little parts of its body of the one warm spark in the heart of an Arctic crystal, except it doesn't have to wrap itself in the blanket. The blanket is under its skin.

they're just really called and miserable all the time. But of course that would be it'd be that's rather unreasonable with me.

affiliated with Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. So I thought maybe we could start off by going through this entry talking about some of the points that Iverson raises and branch out for discussion at various places as we go along. All right, so what is blubber. Blubber is fat, yes, but it is not just fat. It is not just like the adapose tissue of other mammals in the world. Blubber is, in Iverson's words, a quote dense, vasculared layer

of fat beneath the skin. So it is a special type of fat tissue that is a characteristic trait of marine mammals. It is found only in the mammals of the sea. There are not really fully land dwelling animals that have blubber, so all cetaceans meaning whales, porpoises and dolphins, all cyrenians like manatees and dugongs, and all pinnipeds meaning seals have blubber. Iverson notes a couple of exceptions of marine or semimarine mammals. Things you might think of as

marine mammals or semimarine mammals that don't have blubber. Polar bears and sea otters don't have blubber strictly defined, though obviously they do have and rely on fat. Polar bears tend to store a lot of subcutaneous fat, which is used to insulate the body, but it doesn't have the special structural and chemical features found in blubber. It's more like regular terrestrial carnivore fat, but they do keep a lot of on their body when they can to help

stay warm. Blubber is an incredibly important adaptation for marine mammals. It makes marine mammal life possible, and in some species, at particular stages of life or times of the year, blubber can make up fifty percent of the animal's total body mass. So you know some whales you meet are half blubber. In part, blubber serves the same purpose as fat in other organisms, so it stores food food energy that can later be burned to support the body's energy

needs when food is scarce. But it also does other important things for marine mammals. Most importantly, probably blubber is insulation. It protects marine mammals body heat against the often extreme cold of their watery environments, and it does so in particular interesting and dynamic ways. We'll talk about that more as we go on, but blubber also aids in buoyancy and has interesting functions in help with locomotion, maybe in some cases streamlining the body in the water, in other

cases even serving as a kind of spring. We can talk more about that later. And also you can learn a lot about a marine mammal by looking at its blubber. At the species level, you can learn about its evolutionary history and environmental specialization, and at the individual level, you can learn a lot of things about like what this animal has been eating and where it's been foraging by looking at its blubber.

blubber is not quite a hard shell. But on the other hand, it can sustain a fair amount of damage from an animal's environment, so it does have to a limited degree some sort of an armor role here as well.

the skin. And this is in contrast to visceral fat, which is stored deeper in the body cavity surrounding the organs. Blubber sits just under the skin, kind of loosely enveloping the underlying layer of muscles. And as I mentioned, blub is not just fat. It is this special type of fat tissue which is shaped by evolution for a very

special purpose, primarily that of a dynamic thermal insulator. So in most marine mammals, the blubber layer is a continuous covering for almost the entire body, with some exceptions like the appendages. Often the flippers won't have blubber. Though it does tend to cover the whole body, it doesn't cover it evenly everywhere, so the thickness and structure of the blubber layer differ on different parts of the body for reasons we'll probably get into later.

or without much fat stored in them. They're initially mostly protein and water, and then as the animal is able to take in more food energy than needed to sustain its metabolism, the extra energy is stored as lipid molecules. In the now mature fat cell as atiposites accumulate these liquid droplets for storage. They swell up in size, so adipocytes are very stretchable cells. Their cells that can grow and shrink as needed. When they fill up with fat,

they stretch and grow. When fat stores are depleted, they can shrink back down to size.

But we're often just coded to, you know, buy the media and culture to have to feel a certain way about even the idea of a fat in our body.

It's like, you know, something that can be accumulated to be used later and serves important purposes along the way. So these fat cells, they can they can grow and shrink as needed, and in most atipos tissue, these fat cells are packed densely together and held together by what's called an extracellular matrix, a kind of honeycomb mesh or three D net made out of things like collagen fibers. Collagen is the structural protein found in animal skin and

in connective tissues. A lot of cooks will be familiar with collagen because structural collagen is a major part of what makes certain cuts of meat tough, Like tough muscles usually have a lot of collagen connective tissue in them, and so these are the cuts that typically you have to slow cook. You want to cook for a long time, maybe with moist heat, and that type of treatment tends to turn these tough cuts of meat with a lot

of collagen tender. It makes them tender because the collagen breaks down and turns into gelatin, giving the final product a soft texture. This is part of what sets blubber apart. Blubber has significantly more of this structural material than most adipose tissue in the animal kingdom, more collagen, more elastic fiber.

And for this reason you can kind of think back to the description in Moby Dick of the blubber as saying, you know, it's kind of like firm, close grained beef, but he describes it also as tougher, as elastic and compact. There's something dense and springy about it. It's just it's tough stuff. And I think a lot of this probably comes from this extra collagen and elastic content. I expect we'll get more into this in part two when we talk about blubber as a food item, which it is,

especially for people living in the polar regions. But I would suspect because of this extra collagen and structural fiber that blubber is a good bit chewier and tougher than most animal fat. Maybe we'll have to revisit that next time.

important adaptive qualities for the marine mammal. Another common structural distinction that biologists make about blubber as opposed to other adipose tissue is that it is highly vascularized. In Iverson's words, quote, blubber also contains numerous blood vessels and specialized shunts called arteriovenous anastomoses or avas, which allow larger and swifter blood flow than would be possible through the capillaries alone and are important to the thermoregulation process. So this is the

really key thing about blubber as an insulation method. It's not just static insulation. Say like a beer cooler. You know, a beer cooler is really it's great. Beer cooler provides great insulate You can put cold things in, It'll stay cold a long time, even on a hot day. You can put hot things in it. They'll stay hot for a long time. You know, it's great, but how insulating the cooler is does not change unless you open the lid.

Blubber is adapted to selectively either insulate the body and keep the blood flow and thus heat exchange to the outside minimal, or on the other hand, to allow rapid voluminous blood flow through the fat tissue and near the skin, including by connecting veins directly to arteries, or I think these would be slightly smaller vessels like arterials and you know the next step down from veins and arteries directly

connecting those things. And this is important because it gives the animal a lot of control over its internal body temperature. The blubber is an insulator that protects body heat against the cold water when needed, and then allows the mammal to wrap it dump excess heat into the water when needed, for example during exertion to make more vigorous activity possible without overheating, or just when it goes into hotter, warmer waters.

I have questions about that. But there is at least large variability between species and between individuals. So as animal bodies get bigger, of course, it tends to be the

case that volume increases more rapidly than surface area. This is sometimes known as the square cube law in animal body sizes, and as a result, larger species tend to have much thicker layers of blubber, so some examples given by Iversen in this entry are that you might get arrange for like seven to ten centimeters of blubber in a lot of adult seals, and then up to twenty to thirty centimeters in fin whales, and then up to fifty centimeters of blubber in the bowhead whale, which I'm

to understand is one of the most shocking and amazing blubber carriers in nature. Maybe the raining champion. I think we're gonna you've got some stuff about the bowhead whale, don't you, Rob.

delaying entry into the water. So you know, most baby seals are born on land or born on ice, and they'll have to wait until sufficient fat stores are built up before they can dive in and go for that

wet life. But the blubber accumulates fast, So Iverson mentions the example of a newborn harp seal or of Foca grenlandica, in which blubber is only on average about six percent of body mass when the seal is newly born and the blubber is only made of about twenty percent fat, and then after a mere twelve day lactation period, the baby seals are often up to fifty percent blubber by weight and the blubber is ninety percent fat, So six percent of the body to fifty percent of the body

in twelve days. And you can see the opposite during times of fasting when adults are separated from food, for example nursing mothers. We can talk about that in a bit. When adult marine mammals can't get food, fat stores rapidly deplete. So what types of lipid molecules do you find in

marine mammal blubber. Well, marine mammal fats are mostly made up of fats that these animals get directly from their food sources, including long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids or PUFA, and what Iversen calls quote unique fatty acids produced at lower trophic levels of the marine ecosystem, meaning fats from lower down the ocean food chain. That's the majority of it. But marine mammals can also make their own fat. They can synthesize fat molecules from excess amino acids in the diet.

I think they probably could make fat out of carbohydrates as well, but the diet of a marine mammal is extremely low in carbohydrates. Usually they're doing that Atkins diet life.

So one of these experiments is called the Crisco glove or the blubber glove test. So the way it works is you get a bucket of ice bucket of ice water, and then you make a couple of mittens out of ziploc bags. So one is going to be your control mitten. That's just two bags, one bag inside of the other with nothing in them, and then your hand is inserted into the inner bag and then the other pair of

bags is your test mitten. So your hand goes into the inner plastic bag, and then that bag goes into a second plastic bag with a layer of vegetable shortening in between the two bags. And then the idea is when you dip both hands into the water, you will feel the difference. The layer of shortening in the test bag insulates your hand and keeps it warm against the cold water, while the hand in the control bag will rapidly lose heat in the ice water and start to feel very cold.

If you doubt this, just try it. Just feel the difference between standing naked in a room where the air is sixty degrees fahrenheit and then standing naked in sixty degree fahrenheit water. The difference is unbelievable. It is starting. The former is probably going to be a bit uncomfortable, depending on your preferences. The latter is shocking. It will make you gasp.

No such luck really in the water. The water absorbs your body's heat directly to whatever stint. There is a warm layer of water around your body. When you're in the water, it's microscopically tiny and does not really do anything to help keep you warm. So you just out of luck there.

are not like that. The water is a harsh place for a homeothermic endotherm to live.

are still fairly big by land mammal size. And this is evolution taking advantage of the square cube law. Again. As animal bodies get bigger, volume increases more rapidly than surface area, and animals lose heat to the environment through their skin through their external surface area. So the internal body volume makes and holds the heat, and then the surface area, which decreases in proportion to that volume as

the animal gets bigger, is what loses the heat. Thus, bigger body, greater relative heat retention.

so it traps air as insulation. But in cases where fur would be less effective, like for animals that live underwater all the time, blubber is going to be the better option, especially because blubber works in both air and in water. So in animals that live in the water and then come out of the water, like some seals and so forth, blubber is still going to be helpful because it works in both places. Interestingly, some marine mammals, like sea otters, are able to use fur as insulation

even in the water. And I got interested in why this is. It seems like this is because their fur is so good at trapping air. It can actually carry an insulating layer of air with them when they dive. So they go into the water and they take a little bubble with them that's trapped in their fur. It seems like this doesn't work, maybe if they dive too deep, where water pressure will compress or push out the bubbles

of air and the insulation will be lost. And this is probably why you only see the preference for fur over blubber retained in marine or semimarine mammals like otters and polar bears, which spend significant time in the air up on the land or on the ice and don't need to dive too deep or for too long. As I talked about earlier, bluffer is an amazing adaptation for heat control because it is not a passive static form

of insulation. It's dynamic and it can change its insulating properties as needed in the moment, particularly by changing how it channels blood flow. So when warm arterial blood from the center of the body flows out toward the skin, it loses heat to the surrounding water and cools the body. When that arterial blood is kept away from the skin, it retains heat. And because blubber is so vascularized, it can switch this heat exchanging blood flow on or off

depending on what the animal needs. So in cold water it can keep the blood further inside, keep it away from the skin, and in warmer water or when the animal is working out, it can open up the vessels and shunts and allow the blood to dump heat into

the surrounding water through the skin. Unsurprisingly, given the we've already talked about, marine mammals that live at higher latitudes or swim in colder waters tend to have thicker blubber for their body size, and the smallest cetaceans are usually not found at the highest latitudes.

energy storage in marine mammals. Of course, you know, energy storage is one of the main purposes of fat across all the animal species that use it, but it has a special role for marine mammals, especially in species that migrate across great distances, using one environment for forage during a fattening season, and then a different, sometimes far away

environment for important parts of their reproductive cycle. For example, billen whales that travel to high latitudes in the summer for feeding opportunities because of summertime booms and their planktonic food sources at higher latitudes, and then we'll travel down into warmer waters to give birth, to lactate and rear their newborns.

female polar bears. And this is especially interesting because of the increased metabolic demand on female mammals to produce milk after birth. So you know, after the mammal gives birth, the mother's body is working overtime to synthesize rich, highly caloric nourishment for the newborn. In most mammals, the mother needs to draw on fat reserves and feed herself externally

during this period to lactate enough for her young. But amazingly, some baline whales and large seals are able to nurse their young without eating hardly at all, drawing almost entirely from blubber reserves, and this is very unusual in nature, Iversen writes. Quote in species that fast through lactation, females switch almost completely to a fat based metabolism. For instance, during a sixteen day lactation period, a gray seal female draws ninety seven percent of the energy supplied to her

pup solely from her blubber stores. Wow and note that the mother's blubber reserves during gestation will also dictate how much blubber the pup is going to be born with and then from here. Blubber also still plays an important role in reproduction in the development of the young for the pups because the blubber that they've gained during nursing and that they're born with will sustain them after nursing

is over and until they're able to feed themselves. Blubber Iverson notes is also an important reserve of internal water. I never really thought about this but she gives the example of gray seals during lactation. The mother seal is going to be losing a lot of water through milk production and is fasting on land to feed her pups,

so she's not able to replenish water stores externally. Extra water comes from the oxidation of fat reserves in blubber for metabolism, because when you burn fat inside your body, water is a natural byproduct of that chemical reaction. This is called metabolic water. So metabolic water is produced, and

then that provides water that the mother mammal needs. Now, I want to note that in this entry, Everson also gets into a lot of other interesting stuff about the role of blubber and locomotion, buoyancy, movement, and other things. We might talk more about those topics in the next part in this series, but we want to definitely have time today to talk about the bowhead whale.

Mark Cardine. An excellent book for a anyone who just wants to read about whales at home, or if there's any possibility that you'll get to see one out in the world going on any kind of like a whale sight seeing tour, you know, And these are available all over the place. It's worth having a copy of the book. It's it's mobile. I've lent it to friends who have gone on cruises before. It's a great read, lots of illustrations. It informs you and also helps you in identifying what you're looking.

true blubber superstar is not the enormous blue whale. It's not the fin whale, it's not the mighty sperm whale, but it's rather the whale species it's often ranked fifth in overall size, and that is the bowhead whale.

of hump portion of the head is for. Uh, But yeah, these are These are enormous creatures. Uh. And in terms of the size rankings, they're generally ranked behind the right whale right as in right handed or right as incorrect. The right whale is just a little behind the bowhead whale and overall size. In fact, they look a lot alike. The bowhead whale was once known as the greenland right whale. Briefly,

there are three varieties of right whale. The pygmy right whale is not a true right whale, and the name right whale is thought to refer to one of two things, possibly both at the same time. So first of all, there's English whaling wisdom that right whales were the correct whales, the right whales to hunt, because they had this trifecta of features. They were slow, so easy to chase down and kill, and then when you did kill them, they were so buoyant from their blubber that they floated. They

definitely floated, so they were easier to harvest. And then when they were harvested they produced high amounts of oil and balen per individual. And the oil, of course is key. We'll get into the balen as well. But in terms of the bowhead whale, and the right whale species, they have a lot of blubber, and therefore they produced a lot of whale oil. Because whale oil was made from

rendered blubber. This was the product of whaling that was most important to the whaling industry generally, certainly in its later industrialized stages. You know, humans have hunted whales for a very long time, but you know, whale oil was one of the major products during the most destructive heyday

of human whaling. Now. But the other side of the coin is that, apparently, according to Carwadine, mid nineteenth century scientific observations were made that these were the right whales in that they were true and proper examples of what a whale should be. Which I have a little harder time wrapping my head around that one, because I mean it's like, what is the best whale? I mean, you know,

they're all they're all whales. But I think it comes down to just sort of like basic body size identifiable as a whale. It is a bleen whale and so forth. All right, So coming back to the bowhead whale, Yes, this is your blubber superstar baileina mistacetis, which means mustached whale. It sounds like it's going to be something about mysterious whale or something, but no, it's mustached whale. And this refers to the bowhead whales bleen plates. We talked about

baileen plates previously in our episode on gray whales. These are, of course the big filtery teeth like structures in the mouth that home through plankton or the marine animals that they are consuming. And for the bowhead whale, these are the longest of any animal, up to four meters or even five point two meters, so we're talking thirteen to seventeen feet long these baleen plates individually, and they're you know,

hundreds of them in their mouths. And the name bowhead stems from their large, strongly arched or bow shaped rostrum and mouthline.

it is the only baileen whale to do so. It ventures up into the high Arctic during the summer again like all like other baileen whales, it moves north, chasing those blooms and the richness of food that it can that it can achieve up there. But these guys go really far north and then during the winter they go back into the lower and Subarctic, but are thought to stay close to the ice edge. So for whales of this species venturing down into the Bearing Sea, that's snowbird behavior.

That's like pretty much as southern as they go. They're definitely not going down to Mexico.

the orca. And according to Carwodine, the bowhead whale's close association with sea ice maybe how it primarily protects itself from killer whales that tend to avoid extensive Arctic sea ice. The problem, of course is that due to climate change, there is less and less sea ice out there to protect them. So it's you know, kind of an open question of how they will adapt and how they are adapting to these changes. Now, coming back to what you noted earlier about the shape, the upper shape of the

bowhead's enormous head. It lives in close proximity to sea ice, and it will venture under sea ice when it's feeding, and it can stay down for an extended period of time depending on what it's doing and what the circumstances are. Well, as with other whales, it's like if they were observed while being chased by whalers, like, they can stay down even longer. But bowhead whales will come up under the ice and they can break through ice that is up

to sixty centimeters almost two feet thick. Whoa yeah, in order to create their own breathing holes in the ice large enough for that raised hump like part of their enormous head to come out and allow their their blowhole to gain access to the air.

body you're looking at. Carbadine says five point five to twenty eight centimeters or roughly two inches to eleven inches in thickness, so up to nearly a foot of thickness in general, So again the thickest of any whale, depending on how you're measuring it. The bowhead whale is still going to be at the top of any list.

and they will turn and fight if needed. But again it also seems like refuge in the sea ice is also part of their strategy. But since they are slow, deliberate swimmers, that's one of the reasons that humans thought that they were ideal whales for hunting. You know. Sadly this is as with you know, like other whale species, like the gray whales. It's it's written that they are

rather cureious about humans. That they encounter humans and boats and so forth, you know, they'll come up and take a look, which you know, makes it even all the more tragic that we were so brutal towards them. Again during this highly industrial period of human whaling, when they were you know, intensely hunted and threatened, and as human whalers took advantage of that slow speed, their rich balen and their blubber and the latter of which of course

also made them so buoyant. So all these things made them ideal prey for whaling enterprises.

And just also the scale that they're on. Anytime there's there's a reminder of just like how big is a human compared to you know, the guts of a particularly large whale. It's just it's mind Rand.

that we're more in balance with the creature's natural patterns. Yeah, but as we said, certainly right in if you have any Glover thoughts right now, and maybe they will, there'll be something that we'll read in the next episode or at least in a later listener mail episode. Just a reminder to everyone out there that's Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays

and on Fridays. We just set aside most serious concerns to talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.