Whale watching is on as the humpback whales travel between the Southern Ocean and Hervey Bay, Queensland. They are warm-blooded mammals that are supposed to be descendants of land-based mammals which ventured back to the ocean.
You and I are warm-blooded mammals too, so what say we meet down at the beach one day and join the humpbacks on our discovery safari. Bring your flippers to make it easier to keep up with them but wet-suits won’t be necessary - just imagining we carry 30% of body weight in blubber like they do should keep us warm. Hopefully.
When it's time to dive deep just take a few big breaths first, and forget decompression stages – if it works for whales it should work for us. Unlike whales, our nose and throat are connected - but don't worry about that, we’ll just swallow whatever food we find with the seawater. If we strike any trouble we’ll call them with clicks and whistles - you know, by recycling air through 'monkey lips' like they do in their nasal passages.
On second thoughts, I've decided to wait for you with the paramedics in the rescue helicopter. I expect you might be in bad shape with hypothermia, kidneys clogged with salt, 'the bends' and heart failure from nitrogen bubbles in your soupy blood…...that is, if you didn’t drown in the first five minutes when you opened your mouth.
Or how about we scrap that idea and just use binoculars to watch these marvellous creatures do their thing? We might even see a whale feeding her calf by squirting milk into its mouth – now that’s what I call a ‘fast-flow’ pump!
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