How Long Would It Take One Person to Eat a Blue Whale?

[Ambivalid]

I wonder what whale tastes like? Chicken, prolly.

[Marvin_the_Martian]

@DrDeth

Like, say the Arctic?

For now. Who knows by the time you’re polishing up the last of the whale…

[scr4]

@Ambivalid

I wonder what whale tastes like? Chicken, prolly.

It’s much closer to beef or mutton. It’s a mammal, remember.

[TokyoBayer]

@scr4

It’s much closer to beef or mutton. It’s a mammal, remember.

But more oily.

Whale meat was used in school lunches for a long time and a lot of Japanese don’t particularly have fond memories of it.

[Tamerlane]

@Green_Bean

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!

They’re really quite torpedo-shaped. It’s just that they just go on and on and on - they are quite legitimately huge in person, but it is mostly the length that is astounding.

Come visit the Monterey Bay in the summer and go whale-watching. Good ( for variable values of “good” ) chance of a sighting.

[Ambivalid]

@scr4

It’s much closer to beef or mutton. It’s a mammal, remember.

Yeah the “tastes like chicken” part was just a joke.

[Blue_Blistering_Barnacle]

@Darren_Garrison

Never was possible. There is already a term for that–sauropod.

Why is sauropod better than brontosaur?

Anyway, eating whale beats slurping goo in Zion.

[Lumpy]

I think the name “Brontosaurus” should be preserved for the now-fictional sauropod that was thought to be semi-aquatic, staying mostly underwater like a hippopotamus. E.g., in the original King Kong movie the raft was overturned by a Brontosaurus.

[snfaulkner]

@Lumpy

I think the name “Brontosaurus” should be preserved for the now-fictional sauropod that was thought to be semi-aquatic, staying mostly underwater like a hippopotamus. E.g., in the original King Kong movie the raft was overturned by a Brontosaurus.

Dude! Spoilers!

[MacLir]

@TSBG

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.

Unless you grew up eating it, you likely wouldn’t like it anyway.

Imagine the toughest, stringiest piece of chuck steak you ever had. Now cook it in sardine oil. That’s what whale is like, as I remember it. (From long before Greenpeace and the Marine Mammal Protection Act) Blue whale, as I recall, but I was young at the time.

[Darren_Garrison]

So, just for the record, if all the spiders in the world got together, they could eat a 300,000 pound whale in about 11 minutes. (Let’s pretend for a second that they can eat every part of the whale, and I did my elephants-to-whales conversion math correctly.)

[ftg]

@Darren_Garrison

So, just for the record, if all the spiders in the world got together, they could eat a 300,000 pound whale in about 11 minutes. (Let’s pretend for a second that they can eat every part of the whale, and I did my elephants-to-whales conversion math correctly.)

You run into the square-cube law here. There’s nowhere near enough surface area to allow all the spiders access to the whale. Almost all will be looking at the back ends of the spiders ahead of them.

Now if you dispersed the whale carcass into a lot of fine bits, then maybe. That’s going to be a lot of dynamite.

[Dana_Scully]

@Green_Bean

Assume they eat 2,500 calories of whale per day.

A long time.

[Angstwulf]

@gigi

I’d krill for some braised whale right about now.

Stop spouting off that nonsense.

[markn_1]

@EdelweissPirate

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.

The approximate exponent of 1.09 was derived from terrestrial animals, which support their weight on their bones. As HoneyBadgerDC mentioned, whales are aquatic and don’t support their weight using their bones, so whale bones could be proportionally lighter than terrestrial animals’ bones.

The Canadian Museum of Nature has a blue whale skeleton from an animal that is estimated to have weighed 80-90 tonnes. Based on the formula in your link (bones = 0.061 * animal[sup]1.09[/sup]), the bones would be predicted to weigh 13,000-15,000 kg, but in fact they only weigh 2883 kg.

[Darren_Garrison]

@markn_1

The approximate exponent of 1.09 was derived from terrestrial animals, which support their weight on their bones. As HoneyBadgerDC mentioned, whales are aquatic and don’t support their weight using their bones, so whale bones could be proportionally lighter than terrestrial animals’ bones.

Actually, while I don’t know off the top of my head about whales, some aquatic mammals have heaver bones than land mammals to act as ballast

The Canadian Museum of Nature has a blue whale skeleton from an animal that is estimated to have weighed 80-90 tonnes. Based on the formula in your link (bones = 0.061 * animal[sup]1.09[/sup]), the bones would be predicted to weigh 13,000-15,000 kg, but in fact they only weigh 2883 kg.

This could be affected by the fact that whales do not have (significant) long limb bones.