How do sperm whales and Cuvier’s beaked whales dive to depths of over 2km without imploding?
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The imploding only happens. When you try to put low pressure with a hard shell. Pressure builds up, kaboom.
Whales are squishy and mostly liquid, which doesn’t compress. The only real air cavities of low pressure are their lungs, and those get squeezed down without much problem, same as with human free divers, you can see their chest/sternum/belly move up into the rib cage quite a bit.
I think below a certain limit even the standard lungs would have a problem, so I think some of the real deep diver have some other biological mechanisms to help.
And I remember reading that way down that things like enzymes and basic biological process start running into trouble
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