SO: DD-4

Whales can hit 140 decibels when they make their incredibly loud sounds. This is louder than a jet engine! A Saturn 5 rocket hits just180 decibels.

Here are 3 details about whale bones: In the colored image of a real whale skeleton in this lesson, the large flat shell-shaped bone over the top of the front ribs is called the scapula. The whale’s ribs stop half-way down its body. The spinous processes of the whale’s vertebrae stick up often over a foot. (Look close to the bottom of this article if you need to remember what these are and see how big they are!)

A whale’s brain is about five times larger than ours. Whales are not smarter than us, it has to do with their size. Their nerves are the same size as ours and they need more of them to run all of their super-huge muscles and other huge parts of their huge bodies.

The smooth nose bones of a coyote skull form the “roof” of the inside part of the nose. Whales do not have these bones. But, they do have ribs that can be taller than a man!

Whales in the waters off New York can use their loud sounds and communicate with whales all the way across the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of China.

In WW2, subs learned that there is a unique section of the ocean at 5000 feet that we’ve now named the SOFAR channel. Fin whales were discovered here by submarines. The whales were using this channel to communicate with other whales hundreds and thousands of miles away!

When sperm whales beam their echolocating sounds downward, they can detect giant squids half a mile or more below in the completely dark ocean.

The Titanic sank all the way to the ocean bottom–over two miles! More precisely, it was 12,000 feet. The Titanic split in two because of the pressure of the ocean that it experienced as it sunk to the ocean bottom.

If you hear a huge pipe organ play and the notes move lower and lower until you can no longer hear them, you will eventually feel the vibration of unheard notes. These sounds are called infrasound. Elephants can make these sounds with their 1” thick vocal cords. (See below in the lesson for the answer about the thickness of an elephant’s vocal cords.)

A man’s vocal cords are about 2/3 inch long and about 1/8 inch wide. Women’s vocal cords are shorter and thinner.

The vocal cords which make the human voice are alive! If our vocal cords weren’t alive and they were damaged in situations when we scream too much at, for instance, a football game or at camp, they would be permanently damaged.

The white strips in the picture above are vocal cords. A man’s are less than one inch long. The gap in the picture above is critical in producing the human voice. The red flaps that attach to the cords are called the “serendipitous vocal cords”. These sheets of red skin act like a curtain to force air through the narrow gap between the vocal cords. This produces sound for speaking.

The vocal cords are located just below the place where food enters the food-only section of the esophagus. The esophagus tube then takes food to the stomach.

A man’s vocal cords (the white parts above) are wider and longer than a woman’s.

The longer length and greater thickness of elephants’ vocal cords is what makes it possible for elephants to make sounds more abducted than we can hear.

In the evening, elephants can sometimes communicate over ten miles by using the inversion layer of the air. This is where the air has a warmer layer above a cooler layer. In the example we shared, it was about being in a campground.

Making infrasound for long distance communication is coded for on the elephant DNA. So is snorkel swimming!

Elephants can “hear” the ground vibrating from infrasound with their feet. Their feet transfer the vibrations to their inner ears and messages are sent to their brain.This crazy ability to hear through elephants’ feet works so well for elephants that they can hear their infrasound and foot-stomping six miles away!



Their “foot hearing” is actually so sensitive on some days that they can hear the thumping of helicopter blades 90 miles away and even hear thunderstorms over 100 miles away!

The relative of the giant squid is the colossal squid, which can weigh up to 1600 pounds. They have been known to dive to depths to 7,000 feet! The sperm whale feeds only on the giant squid, however. The colossal squid have a lethal toxin to the sperm whales in its beak. Sometimes there are giant squid suckers scar marks on a sperm whale’s skin.

A colossal squid has one of the biggest eyes on earth, measuring almost two-and-a-half feet wide.

Write 2 facts and applicable messages about the devotional sections in this Digging-Deeper.