One marine mammal has been documented diving as deep as 9,816 feet — equivalent to the depth of over 30 Statues of Liberty stacked on top of one another.
Marine mammals like whales and seals need highly specialized bodies to dive far below the waves and withstand the crushing pressure of the deep ocean, while going without oxygen for an extended period of time.
"For anything that breathes air and then forages at depth, you've got this real disparity that most animals don't have to deal with," Nicola Quick, a marine scientist at Duke University in North Carolina, told Live Science."One of their critical resources, air, is in one place — and their other critical resource, which is food, is in another place.
Quick's paper noted three things that would allow whales to accomplish such long dives. First, their blood has high concentrations of the proteins myoglobin and hemoglobin, which lets them store a lot of oxygen. Whales can also limit how much blood flows to the outer parts of the body to make sure the vital organs get enough oxygen.
Lastly, the whales probably need a way to quickly buffer out the lactic acid their muscles produce while swimming — although Quick said it's unclear how they might do this .
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