Blue whale skeleton at New Bedford museum still oozing oil

You have to see those whales skeletons in person to understand their sheer size. And if you want to know more than you need to about whales, pick up a copy of Moby Dick. Don't be intimidated by the size. I still can't believe this book was written in the 1800s. Catching a whale was akin to striking oil.

> Catching a whale was akin to striking oil.

Quite literally, apparently.

> to understand their sheer size

In the linked article, towards the middle, the photo shows 2 people reading the plaque next to a pink structure, which appears to be that of a whale's heart. That, combined with the skeleton hanging over them, should give us an idea that we are no bigger to these whales, than probably an average snail is to us (between 5 cm and 9 cm).

Also, In The Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick. It is a non-fiction account of the wreck of the Essex, a Nantucket whaler, that was inexplicably "stove by a whale", and lost at sea - an unheard of occurrence at the time. The crew was forced to survive in open boats for weeks, and resorted to cannibalism.

This was the story that inspired Melville to write Moby Dick.

The book is both a survival story and an investigation of the Nantucket whaling industry and whaling in general, as well as the social and economic background.

The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky (book/audiobook) is excellent on this topic. The Basque, according to current evidence, invented whaling, and were culturally central to its interweaving with human history. The book tells the tale with rigour and flare.

The average snail is 2-5 cm, not 5-9 cm. Just sayin.

Perhaps they meant slugs. In German at least, both are called Schnecken (just one is naked), so perhaps that persists in other languages as well.

I'm guessing much, much smaller than that, taking microsnails into account.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/found-the-worlds-tinie...

But let me just add up their lengths, along with the lengths of all giant african land snails and all other snails, and divide by the total number of snails in the world ... is there a statistical trick that could answer this, like the one for counting undiscovered species? Probably not.

The whaling industry as depicted in Moby Dick is pretty high on my list of the most unbelievable things that really happened. Particularly the range of the boats and the method of catching the whales. Up there with the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs and how the East India company managed to dominate the entire country in terms of sheer implausibility.

Here's the life-size blue whale sculpture outside the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo.

Note the size of the people.

https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/10/e1/e9/42/...

Thanks, sounds amazing! I've checked it out from local library.

I would say the Ice trade was crazier.

And if your rulers are bloodthirsty heart burners and skin flayers, even satan will be received warmly. I mean Huitzilopochtli is giving Kali run for her money in the deities I don't to live under competition.

And east india - you replace the elite and the people underneath will continue following orders - the same happened with the Manchu conquering of china.

I think it's more likely different species in different places. I, in NZ, don't think I've ever seen a slug as much as 5cm long, let alone 9cm.

Commercial whaling, I guess. Whaling began thousands of years earlier elsewhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling

and yet, it was a mere road kill to a tanker

Strapping the whale to the side of the ship to be butchered while sharks feasted on the underside always seemed insane to me.

What other options existed?

Look up banana slug. Common where I live.

Thank you,I stand corrected, should have said "industrialised whaling".

This makes me strike upon an idea seeing as petroleum is leaking from the whale - might whales be used as a renewable oil resource in the same way as renewable lumber? Whale farms and such (not referring to online dating here, but literally a whale farm). The oil of whale might be used for many things such as lighting of lamp or lubrication of machine.

Whale oil used to be used for the things you mentioned, but you run into a lot of sustainability issues on top the ethical issues. (I mean FFS if the probe did what it did in star trek 4, imagine what they would have sent instead for your scenario.)

Practically speaking, you can't easily just let the whales go out into the open due to the risk of someone else hunting them down vs cost of captivity or having them be 'monitored' in the wild.