The first of five clues. Each one below gives a little more away.
My heart weighs about as much as a small car, and while I dive it beats twice a minute.
I eat some of the smallest animals in the ocean and became the largest animal that has ever existed.
My call carries for hundreds of kilometres through water.
A newborn of mine puts on roughly ninety kilos a day.
The biggest creature on Earth, and it lives on krill.
Blue Whale
Nothing that has ever lived — no dinosaur included — has been bigger. And it got there eating animals about the size of a paperclip.
An adult reaches thirty metres and something like a hundred and fifty tonnes. The heart weighs close to two hundred kilograms, and a tagged whale off California was recorded dropping to two beats a minute at depth and rising above thirty at the surface — a range nobody expected an animal that size to survive. It feeds by lunging, taking in a volume of water greater than its own body and straining krill through baleen. Whaling took roughly ninety-nine per cent of the southern population before it stopped in the 1960s; the recovery is real but slow.
Reading five clues at once is not the game. In the real thing they arrive one at a time and every wrong guess costs an hour. Play mystery #38 · today's mystery · the vault
Previous: mystery #37. Next: mystery #39. Or try #52, #53, #54, #55, #56, #57.