There was a small outcry a while back when people thought someone was trying to do this with kittens. Yes, it’s a hoax.
>Now of course they’re not all that closely related, so I’m not trying to claim they are actually whales…
Colibri and Mangetout are on to something. I understand that animals of a certain broad category are called “whales” if they are large and “porpoises” if they are small, in English. Other languages often do not use separate words for these two. So, whales are all large because “whale” is defined to be the larger species of that family of animals.
The proper term to use is cetacean, which covers everything we call a whale, dolphin or porpoise. And if we were to propose that smaller cetaceans would behave/feed like sea otters, they would have to re-evolve feet. If you’ve ever seen an otter eat, you’d notice that they use their front feet (sort of like hands) during the process.
Absolutely - but I think if they were much smaller than dolphins, they’d have trouble giving birth in the water, so they would either be very dependent on certain environmental conditions, or would have to leave the water to give birth - and for this, they would need to be something like seals…
You could have pygmy whales by selective breeding but you’re starting at tens of tons at birth and working down from there.
No. There are several species of whales that are called “pygmies” already, some of which are not even a single ton when they are adults. The pygmy sperm whale weighs about 400kg as an adult, and is only about 1.2m long at birth. No whale weighs “tens of tons” at birth. The largest whale, the blue whale, weighs about 3 tons at birth.
That’ll teach me to go to the article instead of just reading the search engine’s blurb.
That’ll teach me to go to the article instead of just reading the search engine’s blurb.
We do have different visions of pygmy whale. I was thinking home aquarium size.
Okay, I’m not disputing this, but why would small whales have to cme ashore to give birth? Smaller health insurance PPOs?
Sailboat
The thinking is that they need to be some minimum size to maintain their body heat in water. A whale calf the size of an otter pup probably couldn’t. Of course, there are some seals that are larger than some whales, so just being big for an aquatic or semi-aquatic mammal doesn’t mean you automatically get to have your young in the water.
Given that definition of “pygmy”, then your original post was not factually correct. There are a number of physiological problems that would prevent you from breeding whales that size (say, 6 inches).
Another factor, I think, is that their size is not as constrained by weight as that of terrestrial animals: living in the water–denser salt water, at that–their weight is supported much more uniformly, so their size is not related to the engineering, as it were, of their legs.
Certainly that’s the reasoning I was working on here - there might be other ways to work around it, but it seems like keeping the newborns ashore until they bulk up a bit is safest. This might not have been a hard step for the ancestors of cetaceans, but once they had adapted to permanent life in water, it would be a hard step to make back.
pygmy - An individual of unusually small size.
Is there a species that doesn’t develop problems when breed for small size?
Depends on how small. For a whale to be scaled down to 6", it would be about 1/1000 the weight of the smallest cetacean species alive. Most so-called pygmy species are about 1/10 to 1/2 the weight of their non-pygmy relatives. The pygmy hippo, for example, is about 500 lbs. So we would be talking about something unprecedented in mammals.
Not only would the body heat problem be greatly exacerbated, but many cetaceans use echo location to feed and for other behaviors. It’s unclear that you could successfully scale their system down to that level and still have it function properly. Cetaceans are also fairly long-lived animals, which most 6" mammals are not. A cetacean calf the size of a mouse wouldn’t get anywhere near the amount of parenting that a dolphin gets growing up. The one or two calves that a cetacean has at a time probably wouldn’t stand a chance against predators, and the parent wouldn’t be able to protect it. Maybe not a problem in a |“home aquarium”, but definitely a problem in the wild.
As noted, there are plenty of tiny, aquatic or semi-aquatic mammals, but they aren’t whales. If whales evolved into tiny aquatic or semi-aquatic mammals, they’d probably have to change so much that they wouldn’t be considered whales anymore.
Whales of Unusual Size? I don’t think they exist…
Check out the difference between a wolf and a chihuahua!
Now that’s a long term breeding program and I don’t picture any chihuahuas bringing down an antelope but it’s still a demonstration of what can be done.
To be fair, it must be said that many human “breeds” of dog frequently have common health problems though.
I like this question. I hate to hi-jack this thread but…
So looking at selective breeding practices over the last X-thousand years in dogs and cats (and other domesticated mammals), if there were enough interest in a “mini-blue-whale”… would that have been possible in the same timeframe in which we have been given teacup kittens and miniature schnauzers?
If it were possible, let’s say I want my mini-blue-whale. (they’re just too cute!), and we had the infrastructure to make it happen… How long would I have to wait for selective breeding by humans to make them appear in my local pet shop complete with a 100 gallon tank?
Dang I want a mini-blue-whale now.
Cuter than whales, starting out smaller and easier to miniaturize, you can feed them on minnows, and thanks to those movies, kids love them. Miniature penguins. It’s an idea whose time has come. Do you think penguin tastes like chicken, or fish?
I don’t know, but they keep fresh in the fridge for ages.