The deepest dive ever recorded for a mammal was made by a tagged Cuvier's beaked whale. How many metres down did it go?
Try it yourself first
🐘 Animals · metres
Enter an estimate in metres.
Notepad
End a line with = to calculate it.
Show the answer and the method
Answer
About 3,000 metres
The same species also holds the mammal record for holding its breath: one dive lasted 3 hours and 42 minutes.
How to estimate it
A record from a data tag cannot be derived, only bracketed. The best human free divers reach about 200 m, and military submarines operate at a few hundred metres. Sperm whales are known to hunt squid at 1,000 to 2,000 m. The average ocean floor lies at 4,000 m, which sets a ceiling. A champion diver should reach 2,000 m or more. The recorded dive was about 3,000 metres.
Source: Schorr et al. 2014, PLOS ONE
More questions: Animals
- According to the Smithsonian Institution, roughly how many individual insects are alive on Earth at any one time?
- About how many quills cover the body of a North American porcupine?
- Leaving out poultry and pets, roughly how many wild birds are alive in the world?
- Roughly how many species of birds are known to science today?
- A peregrine falcon folds its wings and dives onto its prey. What is the highest speed recorded in such a dive, in kilometres per hour?