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Cuvier's Beaked Whale Breaks Record with Near-4-Hour Dive

A Cuvier’s beaked whale has spent three hours and 42 minutes underwater, researchers at Duke University reported, which is seven times longer than scientists expected the body and metabolism of these marine mammals to allow.

The finding, published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, beat the previous record by over an hour.

“This is just so beyond what we’ve seen before,” Andreas Fahlman, a physiologist at the Oceanographic Foundation of the Valencian Community in Spain and an author of the study, is quoted as saying. “They’re not supposed to be able to do this, but they do.” Credit: Duke University – Nicholas School of the Environment via Storyful