A blue whale has the largest heart of any animal, but the first recording ever made of one beating revealed something stranger than its size: on a deep foraging dive the heart can slow to as few as 2 beats a minute, then race back toward 37 the instant the whale surfaces to breathe

A blue whale has the largest heart of any animal, but the first recording ever made of one beating revealed something stranger than its size: on a deep foraging dive the heart can slow to as few as 2 beats a minute, then race back toward 37 the instant the whale surfaces to breathe

The strangest thing about a blue whale’s heart is not its bulk. It is how close that heart comes to stopping. On a deep foraging dive, the largest heart on the planet can slow to as few as two beats a minute, a pace so far below what physiology predicts for an animal that size that it looks, at first, like an error in the data. It was not an error. In 2019, a team led by Stanford’s Jeremy Goldbogen, with Paul Ponganis of the Scripps Institution …