22 June 2012

How can a Whale live in Icy Cold Water?


We have been wondering how can whales can live in such cold water?  We know that the female whales give birth and raise their young in tropical waters as the babies can't survive in very cold water.What do the adults have that helps them survive?
The answer...BLUBBER! Today we put vaseline ("blubber") in a sandwich bag and sealed it up to recreate the effect of a layer of blubber.  Then we plunged our hands into icy water -one hand in the 'blubber bag' and the other in just a single sandwich bag. 
We felt  the cold water in just the plastic water but the hand in the blubber bag felt no cold. The "blubber "insulated us from the cold water. Whales build up their blubber by eating huge amounts of food in the icy cold water where food is plentiful. As the young whales grow they start to get blubber by eating larger amounts of food. 


2 comments:

Tilly and Amy said...

To room8 Putting our hands in the blubber was very FUN! we learnt a lot . Thank you . from Tilly and Amy

scott and luca said...

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we really liked blubber experiment.Thank you Scott and luca