How long whales hold their breath

If whales are mammals and need to breathe every hour in order to get oxygen, how exactly are they able to sleep? So, in order to sleep, whales and dolphins will engage in what is referred to as hemispheric sleep, where they shut down only half of the brain, and close the opposite eye.

The other half of the brain that stays awake is at a low level of alertness in order to watch for predators to protect their young or other obstacles in the ocean. After usually two hours, whales will reverse the alert half of the brain so the other hemisphere can rest. We are too! If you love whales as much as we do, we invite you to take an epic whale watching cruise with us at Harbor Breeze to see these majestic sea mammals up close and personal as well as other marine life. We have experienced naturalists on board each and every excursion so you can learn exciting facts about whales and their aquatic environment.

Call us today for ticket information to book and unforgettable journey the entire family will love. The Endangered Blue Whale August 5, What Is The Smallest Whale? August 5, Storing Energy One of the biggest advantages whales have for holding their breath so long is myoglobin. Conserving Energy The other remarkable advantage whales have when holding their breath underwater is their ability to conserve energy.

Fascinated by Whales? In , a male sperm whale was killed off the coast of South Africa after surfacing from a dive lasting minutes. Whales' lungs are particularly efficient at taking up oxygen when they breathe air in and out through their blowholes at the water's surface.

Special adaptations help them hold their breath for a long time. Discover the secrets of the deepest-diving whales. Smart cookie preferences. When the whales do come up for a rare breath, they surface for around 2 minutes on average before diving again, leaving marine scientists little time to spot the whales, deploy a satellite-linked location-tracking tag for data collection, or recover data from tags, Quick explained.

But then it's really hard to get data," she said. For the study, Quick and her colleagues reviewed more than 3, dives performed between and , by 23 tagged whales in waters off North Carolina's Cape Hatteras. The scientists divided the dives into two categories: foraging the whales dine on squid and deep-sea fish and non-foraging.

They found that during non-foraging dives, when the animals were not actively hunting prey, the whales descended to depths of about feet to 1, feet to m on average, for an average of 30 minutes.

Foraging dives, by comparison, were deeper and longer, reaching depths of around 5, feet 1, m and lasting about 60 minutes on average, the researchers reported. While researchers don't know for sure what the whales are doing in the ocean depths when they aren't hunting, they might have evolved the ability to linger in deeper and darker waters to avoid predators such as killer whales, which hunt visually, Quick said.

Related: Photos: See the world's cutest sea creatures. Diving mammals can remain submerged after they deplete stored oxygen by switching to anaerobic respiration, which causes lactic acid to build up in body tissues, contributing to muscle fatigue. When the scientists applied that formula to their data, they estimated that Cuvier's beaked whales could hold their breath for about 78 minutes before anaerobic respiration would take over.

Previously, in , another team of researchers reported a record-breaking Cuvier's beaked whale dive that lasted 2 hours and However, when the new study's authors examined data from , they discovered a pair of extreme dives performed by one whale that obliterated the existing record.

The first dive lasted 2 hours and 53 minutes, and that new record was quickly surpassed by an even longer dive of 3 hours and 42 minutes, according to the study.