What The Biggest Whale in the World is Capable Of

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]You're floating in the middle of the open ocean when suddenly the largest creature ever to exist on this planet drifts by you. Bigger than a megalodon.

[00:00:10]>> Bigger than any dinosaur that ever touched this earth.

[00:00:13]>> This is a blue whale with 400,000 lb of mass displacing that much water. The blue whale doesn't even need to touch you to knock you over. So, what is the largest creature that has ever existed on this planet actually capable of?

[00:00:30]Well, to understand what this animal can actually do with this much mass, you first have to understand how big it actually is. Blue whales can be up to 200 tons and 100 ft long. The second biggest animal in the world, the fin whale, weighs about half of that. Don't get me wrong, half the weight of a blue whale is still gigantic, but blue whales are genuinely on another level of massive compared to literally anything else that exists on this planet. All whales though, including blue whales, are mammals. They breathe air just like us. So if you put one on land, it would actually be able to breathe just fine.

[00:01:06]Except for the fact that its sheer weight would crush and kill it completely in under 10 minutes. See, living on land comes with a massive problem. Gravity. Every single step you take, your skeleton is actively fighting gravity just to hold your structure up.

[00:01:21]For a human or even an elephant, bone and muscle are strong enough to handle that downward pull. But when you weigh 400,000 lbs, you can see how this is an issue. The material that bone is made out of, which is bone, physically cannot support an animal like a blue whale.

[00:01:38]Unless, of course, it doesn't have to support it. The ocean is essentially a giant zeroravity simulator. Because water is dense, it provides buoyancy and this upward force pushes against the whale completely counteracting the downward pull of gravity. So essentially their limiter is broken. You can get huge. But just because physics allows you to grow 100 ft long doesn't mean this is remotely practical. There is a reason why only one animal in the world has ever been able to even come close to reaching this size. If you weigh 400,000 lb, you have a massive and immediate problem. You have to feed £400,000.

[00:02:17]Normal predators survive by hunting. A lion spots a zebra, sprints after it, takes it down, and eats it. A great white shark spots a seal, chases it, and bites it. But when you're as chunky as a commercial airplane, hunting becomes difficult. Swimming through water requires energy. And if you've ever pushed your hand through a pool, you'd know water is incredibly dense. Now you're a blue whale pushing 400,000 lb through the ocean. This is going to burn a lot of calories. If a blue whale were to try and chase down giant squids or massive schools of fast-moving fish, the sheer act of sprinting and turning would burn more calories than they actually get from eating the prey. So, the largest creature in the entire world solves this by eating the smallest creature in the world. Blue whales survive almost entirely on krill. These are tiny shrimplike crustations that are barely an inch long. They're actually bigger than some of the microscopic plankton, but still not big. Obviously though, a giant whale cannot hunt individual tiny shrimp. That'd be like a human chasing down grains of rice, which probably wouldn't be very effective. So instead, a blue whale uses the most extreme overpowered eating mechanism in the animal kingdom, lunge feeding. When a blue whale finds a massive swarm of krill, it won't bite it, but instead accelerates its giant blubbery body towards that swarm, opens its mouth to an impossibly wide near 90° angle, and does something absolutely terrifying.

[00:03:44]The entire bottom half of the whale's jaw and throat is lined with deep folds of skin called ventral pleat. When the water hits the inside of their mouth, these pleat expand outward a lot. In a matter of seconds, the whale's throat balloons out to consume a volume of water equal to its own body weight. We are talking about gulping down 20,000 gallons of water and millions of krill in a single mouthful. This amount of water weighs nearly as much as the whale itself. The ocean bends to the whale.

[00:04:13]Once the mouth closes, the whale uses that 60,000lb elephant-sized tongue to push all that water back out through its baine plates. These plates act like a giant filter. The water gets pushed out into the ocean, so it's not actually drinking a million gallons of water a day. And the millions of tiny krill get trapped inside. One single lunge can net the whale over 450,000 calories. They do this over and over again, consuming up to 8,000 lb of krill every single day.

[00:04:42]This sounds kind of insane, but this actually isn't that unique of a feeding method. Lots of other bailed whales use this filter feeding as well. It's just the scale on the blue whale is so large that it's complete chaos whenever it eats. So, I know the question we're all thinking.

[00:04:58]>> What would happen if this whale swallowed you?

[00:05:02]Imagine you're a deep sea diver and you happen to be swimming right next to a dense swarm of krill. Suddenly, a blue whale accelerates out of nowhere because somehow you manage to not see the largest animal in the world and it opens its mouth to begin the feeding. You get caught in the crossfire and the jaws snap shut around you. For hundreds of years, people thought either you'd get swallowed whole, drop into a cavernous stomach and slowly digest, or that you could somehow live inside the whale's stomach and set up a little campfire.

[00:05:30]But this actually wouldn't happen.

[00:05:32]Despite having the absolute largest mouth in the animal kingdom, a blue whale's throat is only about the size of a grapefruit. It is physically impossible for them to swallow you. So, no, you aren't going into the stomach.

[00:05:44]Instead, you are just trapped inside the mouth. And honestly, this isn't to say that it's not even more terrifying.

[00:05:51]You're trapped in pitch blackness, and around you, 200 tons of water sits rapidly draining out. When the blue whale's tongue, the tongue that weighs as much as an elephant, begins pushing upwards, it will force all the remaining water out the mouth and through the baine plates. Eventually though, the whale is going to realize that a thrashing human is definitely not a krill. It can't eat you, and it doesn't want to, so it'll open its mouth and violently spit you out into the freezing ocean. Realistically, there's actually a chance you'd survive this. But blue whales are so large that you might just get crushed or drowned from the sheer amount of water rushing in. Blue whales don't actually attack anything by swallowing things, though, unless you're a krill. They aren't actually aggressive creatures at all, unless, of course, they need to be. If you look at the apex predators of the ocean, they all have some sort of weapon. Great whites have rows of serrated teeth. Giant squids have hooked tentacles. Orcas bite and have advanced pack hunting tactics. A blue whale has blubber. It doesn't have any sharp teeth or claws or any bony armor. All they have is just being absolutely huge. Because the blue whale lacks traditional weapons, it relies entirely on sheer blunt force trauma.

[00:07:06]and its primary weapon is its tail. The tail or fluke of a blue whale is 25 ft wide. If a threat gets too close, the whale will lift that 25- ft slab of muscle and swing it. The kinetic energy generated by this is like the equivalent of getting hit by a school bus flung at you. There's really not anything in the animal kingdom, or really any kingdom that can survive. Most predators on the ocean are fully aware of this. Even a pod of killer whales knows that getting caught on the receiving end of a blue whale's tail slap equals instant death.

[00:07:37]This is exactly why blue whales essentially have zero natural predators.

[00:07:42]Even elephants can get hunted by lions.

[00:07:44]But the scale of the blue whale is just so large that nothing even wants to try.

[00:07:49]You might just die accidentally if the blue whale flicks you. So all modern ocean predators are basically useless against them. But could anything in history have ever been enough to take this down? Let's put the blue whale up against the biggest shark ever, the megalodon. Megalodons average around 50 ft long, and their entire evolutionary purpose was to hunt down and kill giant whales. They had jaws wide enough to swallow a car and teeth the size of your hand. Logically, the megalodon should be specifically designed to win this fight, right? Well, to be honest, we don't actually know because these animals didn't ever exist at the same time. But we can almost guarantee something for sure. This fight would not be anywhere near as easy. Even at 50 ft long, a megalodon is only half the length of a fully grown blue whale. And in terms of weight, the whale is almost triple the mass of the shark. The early whales the megalodon hunted were big, but only around 30 ft big. But let's assume that a megalodon swims up and chomps down on a blue whale. A megalodon's teeth max out at around 7 in long. A blue whale's blubber is over a foot thick. Obviously, this doesn't mean the blue whale is completely immune, but this isn't like hunting a normal baine whale. So, the shark bites down with the absolute strongest bite in planetary history, and its teeth literally did not even reach the whale's muscle. It just gets a mouthful of fat. And then the whale swings back. See, megalodons are sharks, which means they don't actually have true bones. Their entire skeleton is made completely out of cartilage. So if a 400 lb blue whale lands one solid 25 ft tail strike directly onto a megalodon, that cartilage skeleton is instantly caving in. The shark is dead.

[00:09:36]Realistically, this fight could possibly go the other way, too. If the megalodon manages to strike and avoid getting struck, but this is likely a fight that a megalodon wouldn't even bother taking.

[00:09:47]It would just stare at the blue whale, think that absolute behemoth is not worth the risk, and move on with its day. Luckily for the blue whales, though, they don't have to worry about this at all. Megalodons and any other large shark that hunted giant whales went extinct millions of years ago. And realistically, no single animal in the modern ocean is taking down a blue whale in a one-on-one fight today either. But they're still not completely safe. Not from predators, but from something less visible. Plastic pollution is quietly working its way into every part of our oceans. From massive debris floating on the surface to microplastics that are now being found in marine life itself.

[00:10:26]It's one of those problems that feels almost too big to even think about. Like what difference could one person actually make? Well, that's where my friends at Planet Wild come in who have actually done a project to help protect blue whales. I joined Planet Wild myself. And if you didn't know them, they're basically a community of over 20,000 members that fund real on the ground missions to restore nature around the world. Kind of like crowdfunding for the environment. Each month, we as a community support a new mission and they document everything on YouTube so you can actually see where your impact is going within 30 days. As mentioned earlier, one of their missions helped fund research on blue whales using drone technology to study how these enormous animals actually live in the wild. And as a guy who's literally making videos on blue whales for you right now, you can probably see how I'm a pretty big fan of them. If you want to make a real impact, you can join. Choose whatever membership amount feels right for you and cancel anytime. And the first 100 people who sign up using my code blue 4 will get their first month covered on me. So, if you're interested, you can scan the QR code on screen or check out the link in the description. If you want to see them in action first, check out their blue whale mission linked below.

[00:11:40]Today, the only real threat to a blue whale would be the killer whale. And even then, it's not really a threat in the normal sense. Killer whales don't rely on raw size or bite force to take down massive prey. They rely on being hyper intelligent, highly coordinated, and completely relentless. They hunt in packs, communicating, strategizing, and exhausting their targets. And yes, they do attempt to hunt the blue whales, just the babies. When a pod spots a blue whale, they just start jumping it. They will bite at the blue whale's fins, try to cover its blow hole to drown it, and rip off chunks of blubber to slowly bleed it out. Against almost any other whale on Earth, this works flawlessly.

[00:12:21]But the blue whale has a completely different response. When it realizes it's being hunted, it doesn't turn around to fight. It just starts swimming. It powers forward, dragging the orcas straight along with it. The orcas will literally latch onto the whale's fins to try and weigh the behemoth down. But the blue whale just completely ignores them. It keeps swimming, pulling the weight of several killer whales through the ocean at high speed. And it will continue doing this for as long as it needs to, just relentlessly pushing forward until the orcas use their extremely high intelligence to calculate, "Dude, we can't kill this thing." So, they give up and swim away. But this raises a really interesting point. If the blue whale is too big for the megalodon and has way too much stamina for orcas, why does it stop at 100 ft long? Why aren't there 200 ft or even 500 ft whales? It's easy to think that because there's so much open space in the ocean, an animal could just keep growing forever, but eventually biology hits a limit. And the blue whale essentially is that limit.

[00:13:23]There's some walls in the basic laws of physics that stop things from getting much bigger, at least on our planet. And the first wool is just food. Blue whales survive entirely by swallowing massive swarms of tiny krill. But there are only so many swarms that exist. If a whale was 200 ft long, its daily calorie requirement would be so astronomically high that the ocean simply couldn't produce enough food in one place to feed it. Remember that a 200 ft whale doesn't just need twice as many calories because we live in a three-dimensional world.

[00:13:53]It's going to need a lot more. But even if there was infinite food, there's a second problem. Oxygen. Remember, blue whales are mammals. They don't have gills, so they have to hold their breath and dive. When you are a 100 ft long animal, pumping oxygen from your lungs all the way down to your tail takes a massive toll on your heart. If you double that size, your heart physically cannot push blood through miles of blood vessels fast enough. Your muscles would literally start suffocating just from a dive. And finally, there's the actual physics of flesh and bone. Yes, I know I mentioned that water makes them essentially weightless, so gravity isn't crushing them, but mass is still mass.

[00:14:33]Trying to propel hundreds of thousands of pounds of blubber through the water requires an absurd amount of force. If a whale got much larger, its muscles and tendons would literally start tearing themselves apart just trying to swing its own tail. Flesh can only handle so much mechanical stress before it just breaks. The blue whale hasn't just randomly stopped growing at 100 ft. It has hit the absolute maximum threshold of what physics on planet Earth will actually allow. Nature perfectly optimized this creature to the very limits of reality, which is kind of cool to think about. But realistically, it also means we won't see any absolute monster mega whales anytime soon. At least not on this planet. It's interesting because being this size is the only reason it's even possible in the first place for a mammal to survive in Antarctica. If you or I jumped into the Antarctic Ocean, our bodies would shut down in a matter of minutes. Water pulls heat away from the body about 25 times faster than air does. So, freezing water is basically an instant death sentence for any warm-blooded animal.

[00:15:34]And blue whales are warm-blooded mammals. They need to maintain a core body temperature of around 98 degrees Fahrenheit, almost exactly the same as us. So when they dive into polar oceans to feed, they should theoretically freeze to death immediately. But evolution gave them a completely ridiculous solution to this problem.

[00:15:53]That same foot thick layer of blubber that would stop a megalodon's teeth isn't actually only there for armor.

[00:15:59]It's just a giant winter coat. It completely or well mostly traps the whale's internal body heat inside, blocking the freezing ocean water from ever reaching its vital organs. In fact, this blubber is so incredibly effective at trapping heat that the blue whale actually developed the exact opposite problem. When a blue whale is swimming fast, its massive muscles generate a ton of internal heat. And because the blubber traps it all inside, the whale actually risks overheating in water that is literally below freezing. So to survive, the whale essentially has to use fins as radiators. It pumps warm blood directly to the surface of its skin where its blubber is thinner, letting the ocean water cool its blood down before circulating it back into its cool. So the blubber perfectly solves the freezing issue. But again, as much as we'd like to think about how cool it would be if giant monsters are in the world, there's so many reasons why we would see so few animals reach this big.

[00:16:54]There's so many impracticalities to a gigantic body. And it would never just be able to scale up normally like a 50-ft tall human. And it's the exact reason why a blue whale's heart has to be really weird. With a body this big, you move a lot of mass. When you move a lot of mass, you use a lot of energy.

[00:17:12]And when you use a lot of energy, you need a lot of oxygen. For a normal animal, burning this much energy underwater means your heart rate would skyrocket. You would burn through your oxygen reserves immediately and you would drown. When it goes into a deep dive, its golf cart sized heart just stops. The whale consciously drops his heart rate all the way down to just two beats per minute. Two, there are up to 30 seconds of complete dead silence between every single heartbeat. It shuts off blood flow to certain parts of its body, reserving all the remaining oxygen purely for its brain and vital swimming muscles. Essentially, all that's needed for the dive. Back at the surface, the whale usually has a much more normal 40 beats per minute. But this is really all just to show one thing. Being a giant is not easy. I know I'm making it sound like being a giant is just an endless struggle of overheating, drowning, starving, and whatever else, but it does come with some pretty crazy perks. Yes, a blue whale can accidentally crush you with its tail. But reaching this size also unlocks some giant only superpowers. You know how the Hulk can clap its hands together and create a giant shock wave? Well, the blue whale can essentially do that, too. Except they don't use their hands because they don't have hands. Those fins are not going to be able to clap. They just use their voice. When we think of loud animals, we usually think of a lion roaring or a monkey screaming. A jet engine taking off is about 140 dibels, which is loud enough to permanently damage human hearing in seconds. A blue whale's call hits 188 dibels. This is so violently loud that it crosses the line from sound into actual physical damage.

[00:18:53]Water is much denser than air, which means sound waves travel faster and hit much harder. If you were swimming directly next to a blue whale when it decided to let out a maximum volume call, the sheer physical force of the sound waves vibrating is enough to physically damage you. Your eardrums could rupture. And while you probably wouldn't instantly die, you could get so disorientated that you could drown. Yes, the whale just needs to yap to kill you.

[00:19:18]This would only be possible at a super close range, though, so don't be afraid that randomly in the ocean, a blue whale will suddenly just make some sounds and you'll instantly go death. You definitely see the whale coming. And also, whales obviously aren't swimming around just trying to kill random scuba divers. So, what is the actual biological purpose of producing a sound this violently loud? Finding a mate is the most important goal for any living species. But if you are a blue whale, your habitat is the open ocean, which contains hundreds of millions of cubic miles of water. The statistical probability of you just accidentally bumping into another blue whale while blindly swimming through the abyss is practically zero. So, whales use their Hulk voice and call through a layer in the ocean called the deep sound channel.

[00:20:03]Because of specific temperatures and pressures in the deep sea, there is a distinct layer of water where sound waves get trapped. Instead of scattering in every direction and fading away, the sound waves just bounce off this layer horizontally, almost without losing any energy at all. A blue whale swimming off the coast of New York could possibly communicate with another blue whale sitting in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Of course, this would need perfect conditions, but this channel does let them coordinate breeding across insane distances. I guess this is their replacement since they're too big to text with iPhones. Okay, I've hyped the whales up enough. We get it. They're huge. They're unstoppable. They're gigantic. They're every word in the thesaurus that means really big. So, what can actually stop this creature?

[00:20:48]Well, for millions of years, nothing.

[00:20:50]That was until something bigger than the blue whale appeared. Us? No, not actually us. We're like 5t tall. The things we build. Ship strikes are currently one of the leading causes of death for blue whales. When a blue whale is swimming near the surface and a modern steel cargo is coming right at it, the whale's sheer physical momentum means it cannot turn fast enough to dodge it. Remember that even though blue whales are big, modern cargo ships can be over 200,000 tons, not pound, tons.

[00:21:21]This is a completely different scale.

[00:21:23]Metal doesn't need to follow biological gigantism rules. And remember that global underwater Wi-Fi network they used to find mates, cargo ships, and industrial ocean drilling produce massive amounts of low frequency noise pollution. These human-made noises operate on the exact same acoustic frequencies that the whales use to speak to each other. We are essentially jamming their signals. A whale can scream at the top of its lungs into the void, trying to find a mate to reproduce, but because of the engines of global shipping fleets, no one can hear them. A blue whale could tail whip a megalodon and kill it. It could be so big that it could block a horde of orcers. But you can't really beat steel propellers and human industrialization.

[00:22:04]This of course isn't even to mention intentional whailing in history as well.

[00:22:08]Most ship strikes today obviously aren't intentional ramming into blue whales.

[00:22:13]When humans were seeking these guys out only around 100 years ago, tens of thousands were killed. Thankfully, commercial whaling was finally banned, and their numbers are slowly starting to creep up today, but populations for an animal this big take a long time to recover. They are giants. Yes, they are gentle giants, too, unless provoked.

[00:22:33]But, as the saying goes, the bigger they are, the harder they fall. As long as we just let blue whales exist, though, they'll probably stay the biggest animal forever. Thank you again to Planet World for working with me on this video.

[00:22:46]They're genuinely doing amazing work.