I’ll be brief today.
But I want you to know this.
Scared krill.
But first.
Think about the last time you were at the zoo. Or maybe even a circus. Do you remember standing near an elephant? Well. They are incredible creatures, for one. So big. If it was an African bush elephant, it probably weighed around 13,000 pounds. But, oh those big gray creatures. Of all the land mammals, elephants have the largest brains, and probably the best memories. Their temporal lobes (the area of the brain associated with memory) is larger and denser than that of people. Way more. Who knows. They might remember you.
But that’s not what I want you to know.
I was thinking more about the ocean. And how incredibly big that is. So deep. So wide. That water covers more than 70% of the planet Earth. That’s around 139 million square miles of surface area. At its deepest point, it is seven miles deep. So. My guess is, there’s a lot going on down there. Things we have no idea about. Remarkable things.
That’s not what I want you to know, either.
It’s about but blue whale that swims in those deep waters. And it sort of involves the elephant too.
You see, a blue whale’s tongue has the same weight as an adult elephant.
That’s incredible to me, as I think about standing near that big elephant at Disney World, when we had the backstage pass, and I was allowed to feed it.
I can’t imagine that massive elephant fitting inside someone’s mouth, for crying out loud.
But blue whales are the biggest of all the mammals. Their hearts are so big, their heartbeats can be heard two miles away. They can weigh up to 400,000 pounds. That’s 40 elephants worth. That’s 400,000 of me. And they live a long time. They average around 90 years, but some are much older.
For the record, my tongue is about 3.1 inches long. Yours too, probably. That’s the average. And it weighs around 2.2 ounces. It is good for a lot of things, given its size. Like helping us breathe, swallow, speak, and taste.
Mostly, though, I wanted to tell you about the blue whale’s tongue. Around 16 tons of krill pass that tongue as the blue whale eats. Yes, each day, they pass that big tongue on the way to their death. I wonder if they know? I wonder if they are scared.
This planet is a big place, friends. There is a lot going on that we never even consider. Like millions and millions of scared krill.
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“Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.”
― John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
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“The Earth does not belong to us: we belong to the Earth.”
— Chief Seattle
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“Choose well. Your choice is brief, and yet endless.”
― Goethe
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Those poor little things in this big, big world.
