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b"This week let's venture into the ocean and learn about the fin whale!\\n\\nFurther reading:\\n\\nThe songs of fin whales offer new avenue for seismic studies of the oceanic crust\\n\\nFin whales' big gulp\\n\\nThe fin whale can hold a whole lot of water in its mouth (illustration from the second article linked above):\\n\\n\\n\\nA fin whale underwater. Look at that massive tail. That's pure muscle:\\n\\n\\n\\nA fin whale above water. It's like a torpedo:\\n\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\n\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\n\\nIt\\u2019s been too long since we had an episode about whales. Yes, okay, two weeks ago we talked about a couple of newly discovered whales, but I want to really learn about a particular whale. So this week, let\\u2019s look at the fin whale.\\n\\nThe fin whale is a baleen whale that\\u2019s only a little less enormous than the blue whale. The longest fin whale ever reliably measured was 85 feet long, or just a hair shy of 26 meters, but there are reports of fin whales that are almost 90 feet long, or a bit over 27 meters. An average American school bus is half that length, so a fin whale is as long as two school buses. Even a newborn fin whale calf is enormous, as much as 21 feet long, or 6.5 meters. Females are on average larger than males.\\n\\nIt\\u2019s a long, slender whale that\\u2019s sometimes called \\u201cthe greyhound of the sea,\\u201d because it\\u2019s also really fast. It can swim up to 29 mph, or 46 km/hour, and possibly faster. If that doesn\\u2019t sound too fast, consider that the Olympic gold-medal swimmer Michael Phelps topped out at about 4.7 miles per hour, or 7.6 km/h.\\n\\nLike other baleen whales, the fin whale has a pair of blowholes instead of just one. On its underside, it has up to 100 grooves that extend from its chin down to its belly button. Yes, whales have belly buttons. They\\u2019re placental mammals, and all mammals have belly buttons because that\\u2019s where the umbilical cord is attached when a developing baby is in its mother\\u2019s womb. I don\\u2019t know what a whale\\u2019s belly button looks like. Also, the proper term for belly button is navel, and if you\\u2019re wondering, that\\u2019s where navel oranges get their name, because they have that weird thing on one end that looks like a belly button. It\\u2019s not, though. I don\\u2019t know what it is. You\\u2019ll have to find a podcast called Strange Plants to explain it.\\n\\nAnyway, the grooves on the fin whale\\u2019s underside act as pleats, or accordion folds. Other baleen whales have these pleats too. A baleen whale eats tiny animals that it filters out of the water through its baleen plates, which are keratin structures in its mouth that take the place of teeth. The baleen is tough but thin and hangs down from the upper jaw. It\\u2019s white and looks sort of like a bunch of bristles at the end of a broom. The whale opens its mouth wide while lunging forward or downward, which fills its huge mouth with astounding amounts of water. As water enters the mouth, the skin stretches to hold even more, until the grooves completely flatten out. The water it can hold in its mouth is about equal to the size of a school bus.\\n\\nTechnically, though, a lot of that water isn\\u2019t in the whale\\u2019s mouth. It\\u2019s in a big pocket between the body wall and the blubber underneath the skin. The ballooning out of the pocket stretches the nerves in the mouth and tongue to more than twice their length, and then the nerves have to fold back up tightly after the water is pushed out. The nerves fold in a complicated double layer to minimize damage during all this stretching.\\n\\nAfter the whale fills its mouth with water, it closes its jaws, pushing its enormous tongue up, and forces all that water out through the baleen. Any tiny animals like krill, copepods, small squid, small fish, and so on, get trapped in the baleen. It can then swallow all that food and open its mouth for another big bite. Even more amazing, this whole operation, from opening its mouth to swallowing the food, only takes six to ten seconds.\\n\\nBecause it only eats small animals,"