Insulation 8 Beyond-Belief Blub – FT

BLUBBER: Blubber is an unusual fat layer found in many marine mammals. It helps cetaceans like the dolphin several ways.

BLUBBER: This blubber layer covers the dolphin’s entire body except its underside.

BLUBBER: A dolphin’s blubber isn’t like the fat of a cow or pig. It has net-like collagen running through the blubber layer.

BLUBBER: Dolphins’ blubber is firm because sagging or wiggly fat would never work for a dolphin.

BLUBBER: These collagen networks in the layer of fat surrounding the dolphin’s body give the dolphin the firm streamlining it needs for swimming fast and for leaping high.  

BLUBBER: In 2015, scientists discovered a brown fat–BAT–layer in the dolphin fat.

BLUBBER: An “electric blanket”–as the scientists who discovered it called it– made by BAT fat covers half of the dolphin’s body.

BLUBBER: The BAT fat–that covers the dolphin’s entire body–warms the dolphin.

BLUBBER: This brown fat blubber layer changes at different times of a dolphin’s life.

BLUBBER: In Greenland, a population of 3000 Inuit eskimos who eat whale blubber regularly had no cases at all of cardiovascular disease (heart, etc. disease).  The average 70 year-old eskimo had blood vessels as elastic as those of a 20 year-old from Denmark!