For some reason, my boys seem to have an interest in whales lately. Remember, steaming hot whale poop? On the neighbor's driveway?
Today, Jack and I decided to paint a picture. It's a nice thing to do now that school is back in. He had some sketches of whales with a watercolor set, and since he's making a book (it's going to be a bible and he's going to sell lots of copies), AND since this particular picture had a boat in the background, it seemed to be a good addition.
The painting turned out spectacular if I do say so myself, and we experimented with shading in weird colors. That was all well and good. But when I went to hang it up on the line, I noticed something that still amazes and astounds me to this very minute. Obviously, or I wouldn't be blogging about it...
The paper said that the blue whale can grow to 100 feet long! I could not even fathom exactly what 100 feet looked like, so we set out to find out.
We have a very long driveway and I know this because we paid to have it blacktopped a few years back. It is just over 100 feet. We now know this fact because we measured out the distance of a blue whale. Okay, you must, at some point in your life, map out 100 feet and picture a blue whale. It's madness! This set off some internet searches to find out more about this beast. Did you know...
-the blue whale is the largest of any living creature, even larger than any dinosaur! I never knew this! I thought the dinosaurs were the largest. Nope.
-a calf, a baby for goodness sake, weighs 4000 pounds!
-an adult can weigh up to 350,000 pounds. That is 350 THOUSAND pounds!
-if a blue whale was a land creature, it would have never become the size it is now because gravity would cause it's weight to crush itself.
-it can eat 4000 punds of krill a day because the bottom of almost the entire whale is a sort of pleated skin that can expand. Call it elastic pants for whales if you will.
100 feet. I just can't get over it. The boys drew out the whale from head to toe, which made it all the more astounding. As we were walking away, I said, "Imagine if you were Jonah."(In the bible, not the brotha)
Jack said, "YEAH, but at least he would have a lot of room inside there!"
Note to biblical scholars: I know, I know, the bible doesn't say it was a blue whale, simply a fish, but if it makes you feel better, you can tell me again. Not for long though, my son is writing a bible, you know...
Monday, August 25, 2008
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5 comments:
- Ah, and did you know that a blue whales tongue is roughly the size of an elephant (2.7 tons)
- The old testament translates the story as big fish where as in the (KJV) new testament is translated as whale. (mat. 12:40) soooooo saying Jonah and the whale is also correct, your safe :)
i had to let you know that when jack was at our house last week, he informed me that he had the BEST bible made in california and it was way BETTER than any we had....:)
The blue whale's heart is the size of a Volkswagen Beetle!
So i just took a look at the greek in my handy greek text and another translation of whale in the matthew 12.40 passage is "sea monster" chew on that one..haha... whale is good too... or large fish.... or blue whale.... or we could be speaking figuratively like he was in an emotional whale. ok that was a bit far. but really. jonah got swallowed by something big in the ocean. and then it threw up three days later. pretty cool.
You have heard the expression "deeper than whale poo" before, right? Can you imagine just how deep whale poo is? Blue whales excrete a minimum of 2 percent of their body weight - about 3 tons - each day. That's a lot of poo.
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