Actually, it goes the other way: bone mass does not increase linearly with body mass, but rather with mass raised to the power of 1.09. So if a blue whale is 100 times the size of a smaller whale, we’d expect its ones to be 151 times as big as the smaller whale’s. This suggests a smaller proportion of edible material from the larger whale.
Galileo was one of the first to notice this nonlinearity. Here’s an account of Galileo’s take on things and how that correlates to the observable world:
I have always been facinated with the concept of scaling things that actually do work.
In the case of the whale being almost weightless in water I am not so sure galileo's theory here would hold true. Some very large fish use cartilage instead of bone.
I was figuring it as all edible parts being eaten, including organ meats, so muktuk woyld definitely be included.
Hm, interesting.
I realize too that I was envisioning a blue whale as being of a greater relative girth than it actually is, probably as a result of cartoon depictions!
All these posts and no “Need answer fast?” joke. Sigh.
What if you had a really big freezer?
And a lot of Tupperware?
I live in So Cal so jerky would be my only option.
Norwegian Wikipedia refers to a blue whale caught in 1947 by a Japanese whaler. It weighed 136353kg, and had 60962kg meat and 19812kg of blubber. (60962kg is about 134000 pounds of meat). The maximum weight ever recorded seems to be 173000kg, so this whale is smaller that, but I guess the total/meat/blubber ratio is the same.
Using just the meat from above (so no organs or blubber):
Whale meat (no species indicated in the source I found) gives about 120kcal/100g, so at 2500 kcal/day your caloric intake is covered for about 30000 days or around 80 years of eating nothing but around 4 pounds of blue whale meat every day.
Frankly, I’d recommend a salad instead.
Why would you factor it out? Whale oil is rendered down from the blubber, which in all the above calculations is being eaten, not discarded.
This linkwhich is derived from whales that were actually caught and consumed indicates a lean meat to skin blubber ration of 37% lean meat - 63% muktuk (skin- blubber). The Norwegian cite above indicates a 3 to 1 ratio of (assumed lean) meat to blubber.
Re calories you are using just lean meat calories not meat + skin-blubber calories in your calculation.
When I was a kid, I saw a cartoon which lives with me to this day.
Two cavemen, contemplating a ‘brontosaurus’* in the middle distance (midground?). One says to the other, “I’d kill one of those, but then it would be brontosaurus, day in and day out for a month!”
*Yes, when I was a kid, it was literally true that brontosaurs walked the earth (at one time). Then everything’s name got changed, and by the time the dust settled, Pluto was no longer a planet. Now, get off my lawn!
What’s the best part of a Blue whale? Sharks seem to like the tongue. The hagfish on the ocean floor seem to like the blubber. What do humans seem to like?
In Japan, Onomi (literally “tail meat”) is the most expensive cut of whale meat. It is a marbled meat at the base of the tail fin of larger baleen whales like fin whales and blue whales. (Other whales have the equivalent meat but it’s not marbled to the same extent.) More info on Wikipedia.
I call the Onomi!
Like, say the Arctic?
My Dad grew up with the Eskimo, and one small whale fed a entire village for quite some time.
golf clap Bravo.
Good news! Brontosaurus walks the earth again! I mean, they walked the earth at one time again. They once walked the earth again.
Hell, just click the link.
Well, “Bully for Brontosaurus!”*
*My pet solution to the brontosaurus problem would be to use brontosaurus as the name for generic giant dinosaur that is “skinny on one end, thick in the middle, and skinny at the other end” (paraphrasing Anne Elk). Guess that’s no longer possible.
There are restaurants in Iceland that serve whale–most likely not blue whale. I was once told that the cuts came from one whale in a deep freeze, taken before Iceland gave up whaling, but apparently that is not the case–they’re still whaling.
In conclusion, please don’t eat actual whale.
Never was possible. There is already a term for that–sauropod.
I’d krill for some braised whale right about now.