Science Friday - Insulin Marketplace, Hair, Whale Size. December 13, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: December 13, 2019

Why Diabetes Patients Are Getting Insulin From Facebook Almost one in ten Americans are diagnosed with diabetes, according to the most recent statistics from the CDC. With those odds, you likely know someone with the disease. And you may also know that most diabetes patients need to be treated with insulin therapy—frequent injections of a hormone that helps regulate their blood sugar—or face serious complications, like blindness, nerve damage, or kidney failure.  Unfortunately, a good number of these patients can’t afford to purchase insulin through official channels, like pharmacies and hospitals, even with the help of health insurance. In such cases, diabetes patients are turning to what one recent study called “underground exchanges”—platforms like Craigslist, Ebay and Facebook—to get access to the drug they need.  Ira is joined by one of the authors of that study, Michelle Litchman, a nurse practitioner and researcher at the University of Utah College of Nursing in Salt Lake City, to talk about what patients are doing to combat the high cost of insulin in the U.S. Combing Over What Makes Hair So Strong Hair is one of the strongest materials—when stretched, hair is stronger than steel. A team of researchers collected and tested hair from eight different mammals including humans, javelinas, and capybaras to measure what gives hair its strength. The basic structure of hair is similar across species with an outer cuticle layer surrounding fibers, but each species’ hair structure accommodates different needs. Javelinas have stiffer fibers to allow them to raise their hair when it’s in danger. Their results, published in the journal Matter, found that thinner hair was stronger than thicker strands. Engineer Robert Ritchie, who was one of the authors of that study, talks about the structure that gives hair its strength and how bio-inspired design can create better materials. How Whales Got Whale-Sized We live in a time of giants. Whales are both the largest living animals, and, in the case of 110-foot-long blue whales, the largest animals that have ever been alive on the planet.  But whales haven’t always been gigantic. Until about 3 million years ago, the fossil record shows that the average whale length was only about 20 feet long. They were big, but not big. The rise—and growth—of the lineages that gave rise to humpbacks, fin whales, and other behemoths happened, in evolutionary time, overnight. So, why are whales big—and why are whales so big now? Now, researchers who parsed data from feeding events of a dozen different whale species think they have the mathematical confirmation. Writing in Science this week, they say baleen whales, who become more energy-efficient as they grow, benefit from bigness because it lets them migrate to food sources that appear and disappear at different points around the globe.  Study co-author Jeremy Goldbogen, a marine biologist for Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station, explains the delicate balance of energy and size for giant mammals, and why bigness is such a compelling biological question. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. A bit later in the hour, how diabetes patients are dealing with the high cost of insulin by looking for help online. We'll talk about it. And we want to know that if you have diabetes and have had to borrow insulin from a friend or family member or have turned to social media for cheaper access to the drug, we want to hear from you. Give us a call. Our number, 844724-8255-844-844-Sight-4-4-Sight-4-Syte. talk or tweet us at SciFry. Once again, if you've had to get your insulin from social media or friends or family, we want to hear from you. 844-824-8255. But first, what have I told you that one of the

most advanced bioengineering factories is located on your head? Yeah, your hair is one of the strongest materials out there. When it's stretched, hair is, believe it or not, stronger than steel. A team of researchers wanted to know what makes this furry fiber so strong. They collected hair samples from humans, bears, havelinas, and other mammals to examine the structure of hair. And what they found might surprise you, as it certainly surprised me. Their results were published in the journal Matter, and my next guest is here to comb over the results. See what I did with that, Robert? It was terrible, Richard.

Robert Richie is one of the authors of that study. He's professor of material sciences and engineering at the University of California, UC Berkeley, and a faculty senior scientist, Material Science Division. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, he joins us by Skype. I'm sorry. I just couldn't help myself. Have you listened to the show that comes with all the dad jokes, so. Yes, I gather about this.

But I am, I have an engineering degree. I was never practicing an engineer, but I know that you are, and I can understand how you became interested in studying here. Tell us about it. Well, you know, first of all, it's not quite true that it's stronger than steel. It's the so-called specific strength, which is the strength normalized by the density, divided by the density. You know, if you're building an airplane, you want a lightweight material, so you generally have a strong material, which is also lightweight. So the specific strength is the important term, and hair is.

spoken like a true engineer, like a true engineer. But it's not strong. We're not going to make airplanes out of hair. But, you know, this is a very interesting topic from the perspective of making new materials, designing new materials. Nature does things very, very differently the way we do it. Nature has a very small palette of different materials to play with. And, you know, natural materials can't be made in furnaces.

It's all done at room temperatures or near room temperature. But the actual materials that nature makes is quite remarkable. terms of their properties, the combination of their properties, and how much better they are than what they're made of. You know, a sea shell is the mother of pearl, the abalone shell, is something like 3,000 times tougher than what it's made of, which is basically bricks of a mineral cordaraginite, which is blackboard chalk, calcium carbonate. So what we try to do is understand how nature makes things.

are nature's secrets to making combinations of properties and then the ultimate aim is to emulate them and make better synthetic materials. And so hair just is one of the materials we looked at in this category. And properties of hair, as you mentioned at the beginning of the show, are pretty remarkable. We think of it as a cosmetic thing, but really they have very, very strong properties and they They can be extended. You can pull a piece of hair about 40% of its length before it breaks, which is considerably better than a lot of the materials that we use in engineering. And I think I was also surprised to learn how actually the very structure of hair is different.

It's not just one little piece of fiber, right? That's right. I mean, and that's another characteristic of natural materials. People talk about hierarchical structures, which means they have – if you look at them, at the macro scale, you know, normal eyesight, and then you look at them in a light microscope so you can see around in the micron regime. You look at it in the electron microscope. When you go down to the really almost atomistic regime, you see different structures. So there's structures within structures, within structures in biological materials or natural materials. And hair has

exactly that. I mean, the hair itself is a sort of about, well, human hair is about 50 to 100 microns in diameter and has a sort of a what's called a cuticle around it which is a crispy bit which holds it in place but inside that there's cells and inside those cells of fiber little fibers or called microfibrils and inside the microfibals there's intermediate filaments and inside the filaments there's the little you know the the the the sort of helical chains and so this structure at four, five, six different dimensions, and that's what really makes natural materials so amazing in their properties. It's these very complicated structures that they can develop.

And what your team discovered is that, contrary to what we may think, thicker hair is not necessarily stronger than thinner hair, which was surprising to me. Yes, I mean, it does sort of defy, you know, conventional wisdom initially. But, you know, we think this is similar to what was first discovered by Leonardo da Vinci in the Middle Ages. He was doing experiments on wires, and he found that long wires were not as strong as short wires. And there's a statistical reason for this. In materials that have little cracks in and on pair is not an exception here, the bigger, the material, the bigger, the thick of the hair,

or the longer the sample, the higher probability of finding a defect in there. So if you have, so it's a statistical volume type effect. And it's very common in ceramics. So, you know, if you take a piece of ceramic like a luminer and you take a big sample or a small sample, the small sample will generally be stronger because there's a lower probability of founding a defect. And we use something called Wible Statistics, which is a form of statistics, is quite well known, and it fit perfectly into that kind of model. So, yeah, it does seem strange, but in light of that, it's not so strange.

And your team hand-picked and hand-plucked these hair samples from different animals? Oh, yes. I work with my colleague in San Diego, is a guy called Mark Myers as a professor down there, and he tends to pick up roadkill wherever he can, I think. But at any rate, he's Brazilian. He brought a lot of these samples back. He has good ties with the San Diego Zoo and places like that. So we didn't handpicked them all.

I think some of the hair came from some of the people in this project. It's a human hair, but the other ones came from the source and so forth. So give us a rundown on how hair strength compares across the species, for example. Is elephant hair stronger than human hair? Who's got the best strength? Well, human hair is up there. Bear hair and boar hair look pretty strong. Elephant hair is near the bottom because it's very, very thick.

It's, you know, three, several hundred microns in diameter compared to human hair, which is generally under 100 microns. So, but of course, hair has different functions, right? On certain animals, it's a protective layer, so to speak, whereas in humans, it's more cosmetic and of course it holds heat into the head. So there's a functionality to that which can so it's not only the strings. We looked at this havelina hair which is this um it's a central American it's sort of a mammal pig-like mammal and and that tends to when it gets angry once its hair to stand up on its neck as a sort of defense mechanism so that has a slightly different

properties in that it's more porous, and so it can be elevated. So the strength is not the only story here because it depends on the function of the hair. But the human hair is up there. It's one of the strongest of the hairs that we looked at, certainly. You also study fish scales as material to make armor. Well, again, I mean, we look at the structure of fish scales because they are a lightweight armor. They're a very effective lightweight armor and fish. And so we thought there may be some lessons to be learned that we can, from nature, which we can apply to making real armor. The interesting thing, we looked at this Arappimer fish, which is this, I think it's

the largest freshwater fish. It's in, it populates these lakes in the Amazon, which have pranhas in, and it can basically survive prana attacks. So this is, and the prana teeth are the sharpest of any fish tooth as far as I know. So the way it's done, it's again, it's very clever what nature does. You need a hard outer layer to stop the penetration of the tooth. But if the whole scale was made of that, it would simply shatter, like if you drove a nail into a piece of glass.

So the underbelly of this hard layer in the scale is a much tougher material. It can absorb all the defamation and so forth associated with the attack. So it's this, and so if we did that, we take a piece of armor, we put a layer in, we put a hard surface there on top of it, and there'll be an interface between them, which is always a weak link, but nature grades it. There's this beautiful gradient in properties on these scales, from the very hard outer layer to the tougher inner layer. It's just beautifully done. Have we been able to take any of that knowledge and make something practical for we humans? Well, the trouble is that when we make a material, we take a big chunk of metal and we beat it and we cut it up and so forth. That's called top down. We start from the top and work down. But nature goes bottom up.

It starts from molecules and atoms and builds up these complicated structures. And so that's difficult for synthetic processing to actually emulate. So the possible future of this, I think, is that we hear a lot about 3D printing and how it's going to revolutionize the world. 3D printing is very much in his infancy, but we can't really guarantee necessarily good material when we use 3D printing. But that has the means to do bottom-up processing, to start from a small scale and then build up on top of that. So I think once this processing technique, how it you call it, becomes more mature, we have a much better possibility of being able to emulate

these very complicated hierarchical structures that nature makes. Well, Dr. Ritchie, thank you. Fascinating. I see you hate what you're doing. So I'll let me... Robert Ritchie's Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and faculty senior scientists.

material science division at the famous Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. We're going to take a break and when we come back, why are diabetes patients with health insurance using Facebook to get their insulin? And if you have diabetes and you've done this yourself, give us a call 844-8-25-5-8-4-8-25. We're going to talk about this problem after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato.

Close to 10% of Americans have been diagnosed. notes with diabetes, according to the CDC, and that's what? One in ten? With those odds, you probably know someone with this disease, and if you do, you know that diabetes patients need to be treated with insulin and get frequent injections of this hormone that will help regulate their blood sugar, and if not, they face serious complications, like blindness, nerve damage, or kidney failure. But in a sure sign that our country's health care system is broken, many of these patients have trouble getting access to life-saving insulin through official channels like pharmacies and hospitals, even when they have health insurance.

And in such cases, these patients are turning to what one recent study called underground exchanges, black market platforms like Craigslist and eBay and Facebook, to get the drug they need. In other words, they're depending on the kindness of strangers to stay alive. My next guest is one of the authors of that study, which surveyed patients about their use of these exchanges. She's Dr. Michelle Lichmann, a nurse practitioner and researcher at the University of Utah College of Nursing and Salt Lake City. And remember, you want to hear from you.

If you have diabetes and you have to borrow insulin from a friend or a family member, or you've turned to a social community for cheaper access to the drug, give us a call, our number 844-8255 or tweet us at SciFri. Welcome to Science Friday, Dr. Lidtman. Hi, thanks for having me. What tipped you off to researching this question? How did you know all of this was going on? Sure, there's two things. So one, I'm a nurse practitioner at a diabetes center, and I started talking to patients about the fact that they had gone online and found somebody that they wanted to exchange supplies or insulin with. And also, as a diabetes researcher who examines how people use online communities to support health, I was also seeing posts about this.

And so the clinical and the research site came together, and we pulled a team. together from the University of Utah, College of Nursing, U-Health, and University of Colorado to explore this issue. I thought it was very surprising to see that you found over 50% of survey respondents said they donated to insulin? That's true. Wow. So it was insulin and it was also supplies. So glucose strips, glucose sensors, we pulled them all together. Tell us a little bit.

But definitely insulin was one of them. Tell us for people who don't know how insulin works. How do diabetic patients use it? Sure. So insulin is injected either with a syringe or through an insulin pump. So it's injected subcutaneously or right under the skin. And then that helps to manage glucose levels that are rising because people cannot make enough insulin or any insulin at all. I ask for callers to call in about the problem. I want to go to some calls because we have lots of them. Let's go to Michael in Oakland. Hi, welcome to Science Friday, Michael. Go ahead.

So I am not myself diabetic and have not been involved in any of these networks, but I am as a Canadian, and I wanted to raise concerns about a widely held solution for the insulin and other expensive drug problems in the United States, which is to import them from Canada. And I can tell you as a Canadian, when there were surges in this activity historically and even recently during Bernie Sanders' campaign trip into Canada just a month or two ago, it causes local shortages in the supply. The reason we have low drug prices or at least lower drug prices in Canada is not because the drug companies are beneficent,

it's because the provinces negotiate the prices and the supply with the drug companies, and that's what they supply at that price. Michelle, do you agree with that? Is that what's happening in Canada? There's definitely people that were in our study that were accessing insulin through Canada, even Mexico and Puerto Rico, and so our neighboring countries here in the United States

are definitely being affected. Let's go to Noel in Connecticut. Hi, Noel. Hi, there. Go ahead. I am a 29-year diabetic type 1, and over the course of 29 years with the disease, have seen the price of a bottle of insulin go from $25 for me,

up to $400 when I've had my insurance with a high deductible plan. And so I have friends that are diabetic. We kind of go on who's got the high deductible this year, and there's some hoarding that goes on and some sharing that goes on. And the same thing with supplies. I have the pump, and right now, I can't get my insulin supplies because I owe them a good amount of money. So my doctor has been able to get me some samples of things that I'm trying to just, like, cover myself with.

Let me ask Michelle about it. Is this typical, Michelle? Is this how the underground works? Absolutely. So what we saw in our study is that people either had a personal network, family, friends, neighbors, or they started going online in different diabetes, online communities. and they found other people who could support them with the medications and supplies that they need. And I think one of the things that's really important here is that people with diabetes were not trying to make a profit off of another.

So they weren't selling things to make a profit. They were genuinely trying to help another person because they didn't want to see a peer with diabetes suffer the consequences of not having the things that they need to survive. Okay, let's go to some more experiences. Joe from Cincinnati. Hi, welcome, Joe. Thank you for having me. I go ahead. Yeah, I've been a type one diabetic for about 35 years plus.

I was diagnosed in March of 84. And my last job, I had a really high deductible, like someone mentioned, and I had to actually buy some insulin and some supplies for my insulin pump through a Facebook group. That has since been shut down, but there was definitely an undergrad. marketplace for people who I mean I had a good job I just didn't have that great of insurance I also and I was about three years ago I recently have gotten much better health care and someone reached out to me on Twitter and asked me if I could help a woman who who lives in Ohio not far from me her husband had

run out of insulin and was actually very close to being having to go to the ER. And so I was lucky enough to have three vials of insulin I had with Extra, and I meld up all three vials were charged. So they were really, really grateful, and I was happy to help. Thanks for sharing that story. Michelle, when Facebook hears about these groups, what happened? Did they shut them down?

So there has been a policy in place in which if Facebook finds out that this exchange is happening within a group, they do get shut down. And so then it prohibits people from being able to access what they need. And I want to comment really quickly on the high deductibles. In our study, we found that most of the people that responded to the survey were not at the level of poverty. Most people had a decent income and over 95% were insured. And so there's definitely an issue with the high deductibles. There's definitely an issue with how much co-pays are with regards to the tier. Is this unique, the shortage and the ability to find it underground? Is this unique to insulin or are other diseases and drugs finding homes there too?

So with regards to diabetes, there's definitely other drugs that are also being shared online. So as we look at innovation and there's new diabetes medications and also technologies, continuous glucose monitors and various insulin pumps, as we innovate, people are going to want to have those new things that are really making people healthy. But innovation is nothing. And you don't have the means to access those, those things to survive. We have a tweet from Kate who says, I'm a nurse who has to ration insulin. Also turned to Reddit to get insulin. I'm now on good insurance, but it was difficult for a time. I now donate extra supplies and insulin to people who may not have had it. It sounds just like what our caller went through. Absolutely. I think a lot of people have a pay it forward kind of attitude when someone

helps them. When they're able to, they decide that they're in a place where they can help another person. And so it's very reciprocal, this altruism that we're seeing. Well, what do you think personally about this? You're a health care provider. Do you approve of these patients getting insulin any way they can? Well, so I think we have to understand the risks related to this underground exchange. So one of the issues is we don't always know how insulin or supplies are stored. Are they at the correct temperature? There's also issues related to expiration and whether or not, for example, For example, an insulin bile has already been opened. There's an expiration that's tied to that.

But there's also risks on the other side. So if the alternative is to ration or the alternative is to not take medications at all, there's definitely risks tied to that, which include going to the hospital, maybe being in diabetic ketoacidosis or even death. And we've seen those cases of death where people have rationed or not taken their insulin because they couldn't afford them. And there's been cases all over the news where there have been people who have been people have passed away because of this.

Are you saying there are people out there who will give you bad insulin knowingly or try to take advantage of you somehow? So we saw a couple, I don't think it's taking advantage. We saw one case where somebody knowingly took insulin that had not been refrigerated, and that was disclosed to them, and they took that insulin knowing that risk. One of the other things that we saw was that somebody had received a continuous glucose monitor transmitter that wasn't functional and so they just couldn't use it. But we, out of all of the cases that we surveyed, there were only three reports of any type of adverse event and it was essentially

disclosed to them in advance and people chose to take on that risk. Let's go to San Francisco. Carrie, welcome to Science Friday. Hi. I've had type 1 diabetes for 25 years. I am also a nurse and it is kind of like every time I switch jobs or in between one thing and another, I have to get insulin from other people, even though I'm not uninsured because of the way that our health care system works with the patchwork. The paperwork can take last time it took three months for me, even though I was paying COBRA the whole time. This time it has taken two months where I have no access to the coverage that I'm paying

a lot of money for. And so I have to get insulin from friends. And as other people have brought up, it's really ridiculous because this medicine, I've been on it since 1958. And it was 30 bucks a vial done, and now it's 350. And it's just people are dying and, you know, the insurance companies are making record profits. And I think Medicare for all is one solution that would help because even though I have never been without coverage, I am often without access to my prescription drug coverage anytime I start a new job because there's just prior offs. and switching and the paperwork.

And I would say it's happened to me three times in the last five years. And I'm a nurse. I'm pretty savvy at navigating the healthcare system and advocating for myself. And the only thing that's kept me out of the emergency room is borrowing insulin from friends. Okay. Thank you for taking time to talk with us today. Michelle, what about ways to regulate these types of unofficial exchanges? Maybe patients can send extra insulin to a central bank where they can be checked and distributed

to people who need it? creative thinking like that? Yeah, there are some states that actually have laws in place where they can actually do a medication recycle program. Although many states have that law in place, not all states actually enact that. And one of the things that I think is important to realize about those programs is typically they service those who are 200% below the poverty level. And as we've heard from callers and as we saw in our study, there have definitely been people who typically have reasonable jobs with, health insurance that cannot afford what they need. And so those people would actually be left out of some of these medication recycle programs. Talking about insulin and with Michelle Lichman,

Ph.D., and a nurse practitioner at the University of Utah College of Nursing on Science Friday from WNYC Studios. There are lots of people. Here's a tweet. Carrie wants to know via Twitter. Talk about the Walmart insulin. Now, maybe Michelle, you can tell people what this is. It's older and doesn't work the same as Novalog and Humelag, but could be a lifesaver for folks with no choice. I am a mom with two kids with type one. What is she talking about? Sure. So there's different types of insulin on the market, and they all work differently.

The timing or how they peak are different. And one of the things about the, there's two different types of Walmart insulin. One is regular and one is called NPH. And they're the older insulents that we've had on the market for a long time. And they have timing issues that are a little bit less physiologic than some of the newer medications that the tweeter spoke of. And with that, we need to pay attention to timing and also dosing of those medications. And so one of them at NPH typically has to be dosed twice a day, opposed to newer medications that might need to be dosed once a day that can last all day. And there's also timing issues with the meal time insulin regular, where,

you know, you dose 30 to even 60 minutes in advance of a meal where a lot of the newer medications, it's more like 5 to 15 minutes. So there's definitely differences. And so if people decide to move in that direction, it's really important to talk to your health care provider to make sure that you're taking the right dose and that you're timing it correctly. And yes, it is one solution that people can access. There are potentially higher risk of hypoglycemia because of the differencing in timing.

And so just really talking to a health care provider about dosing is really, really critical here. Do you think it's crazy that we're talking about in this day and age about rationing something so important to so many people? I do. I mean, this is a life-saving medication insulin. And I think that when we see companies that are innovating again and again to try and make better solutions for people with diabetes, medications that work more effectively or technology that works, So we have to keep in mind that if there's these innovations in technology or medications, we need to be able to let people access those innovations. And so like I said before, these innovations are great.

But if access is an issue, who does it help? Let me see if I can get one last call in here. Let's go to San Francisco. Let's go to Francisco. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Quickly. Hi. Hi, good afternoon.

Go ahead. Hi. Yes, I'm a family physician with an interest in diabetes, and I've been a diabetes patient advocate and a volunteer for the Diabetes Association for many years. And I've just been struck by the comments I'm hearing from patients over the last several years about the outrageous amounts that they are spending for a medicine that is life or death for anyone with type 1 diabetes and for many people with type 2. and it just has been remarkable to me that in what is, after all, the richest country on earth, that we have not figured out how to provide this essential medication for millions of people. And you're going to have the last word because we're running enough time. Dr. Lichten, any reaction to that? You would agree.

You just said basically the same thing. Absolutely. I definitely agree. I take care of patients with diabetes every day. And I think that that's the major issue. we're now running into as health care providers is people are coming in saying, I cannot afford the things that you're prescribing me. And so we're tasked with trying to find solutions for access all the time. Okay. Dr. Michelle Lichmann, a nurse practitioner and a researcher at the University of Utah

College of Nursing in Salt Lake. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thanks so much. After the break, we have a whale of a tail how the giants of the ocean got so big in the first place. And if they're this big, why can't they get bigger? Our number 844-8255. We'll try to answer that mystery. Take your calls after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday.

I am Ira Flados. Plato. Am I no name? Why are whales so big? I mean, ever wonder about that? It is a serious science question, though. Why would an animal need to be a particular size and is being big worth the cost in food and energy? I mean, your 100-foot-long, 100,000-pound average blue whale needs to keep a lot of cells fed, hydrated, oxygenated, and warm.

Plus, you have to move all that mass around the ocean. So being big takes work. And yet, we live in an age of marine giants. You have your blue whale down to the minky, all bigger than the largest liver. living land animal? Why are these whales so big? And okay, if they're this big, why aren't they bigger? Well, dozens of scientists have been working for almost 10 years, and they've been doing the math on one possible explanation that has to do with food sources. And in new research published in science this week, they suggest that for baleen whales, getting big was the best

way to take advantage of the ocean's massive clumps of tiny krill. Meanwhile, tooth whales who dive and hunt individual animals have a finer balance between calories in, calories out, which could explain why they are generally smaller. Here with more on the biology of Big is Dr. Jeremy Goldbogan, since professor of biology at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Lab. He joins us from the studios of K-A-ZU in Monterey, California. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira. Happy to be here.

Nice to have you. So can you answer for me what makes why as an animal's? so big a scientific question and not just a philosophical one? Yeah, physiologists have long been fascinated by large baleen whales, principally because they're so big. And as a comparative physiologist who's interested in how animals function, how they work, how they interact with their environment, blue whales really create a sense of wonder, trying to understand how life operates at the upper extreme of body mass. What is the pace of life and what is it like to be so big? Was there a time in whale history where they were not this big and over time they've evolved

into bigger creatures? Yeah, and I tell my students this a lot is that we're living in a time of giants. So if you look at the fossil record, you really don't see anything that's larger than today's baleen whales. And what's really interesting is they got big very recently, only in the last about five million years. And so they went from about maximum size of about 10 meters in length up to, you know, the ocean giants that we see today for humpback whales, fin whales and blue whales. And that's at least a doubling in length. But remember, that doubling in length really results in a tremendous amount of weight gain.

And especially for something like a humpback whale that's very girthy per unit length. that's a lot of body mass that these animals have evolved very recently. And even the smaller whales have nothing to sneeze out, right? The minky whales are pretty big. Oh, yeah, certainly. It's definitely elephant size, if not a little bit bigger. All right. Let's talk about how they got big, why they're big, can they get bigger?

Let's begin with the theory that food and the cost of acquiring, it might be the answer to how whales got so big. You've been investigating that theory for years, right? Yeah, and that's another thing. it's so fascinating is that these animals are so big, you can't have them in the lab. A lot of them occur in these offshore environments. So they've really alluded our ability to measure just about anything. So there's a lot of gaps in our knowledge.

We just don't understand basic aspects of their biology. But a field that has now come on the scene is a field we now refer to as biologuing. So we basically have these small computers that we attach to whales using suction cups. So they're non-invasive. They give us a really rich picture of what these whales are doing underwater. We know when and where they feed. We know how often they feed. We now have cameras in these tags.

So it's like watching whale TV. It's really fascinating. So I like to call these daily diaries. And so it's sort of a digital form of natural history. and it's really an amazing tool not only to share with the public, but also it allows us to test a lot of age-old questions, like why are whales big and why they aren't bigger. Well, I want to get to that a minute,

but I want to talk about something you have talked about, and that is the huge difference between the whales that have teeth and the filter feeders like the blue whales. Give us an idea of how much energy, why do they feed on different things, and how does that make them allow them to survive? Yeah, so the two great clades of whales, whales, which in our study we had tag data from very small harbor porpoise, which you could pretty much hold in your arms, up to sperm whales, of course, which are the largest tooth whales.

And they feed on single prey, so one prey item at a time using echolocation. And that contrasts with baleen whales, of course, which have no teeth. And they use a filter inside the mouth using these baleen plates and fringes on the inside of those plates that act as a filter. to filter volumes of water that have very small prey like krill suspended in that water column. And so what's interesting is that, and this was really unexpected, is that if you look at the stomach contents for these different tooth whale species, what you find is that the size of the prey item that you can reconstruct using these small bits of anatomy that are left over after digest. So a lot of these deep diving tooth whales feed on squid. And you get these beaks that are left inside the stomachs.

And so depending on the beak, the anatomy of it and the size of that beak, you can actually reconstruct the size of the prey item. And so we use that data in order to reconstruct these energy budgets for different whale species across scale. So what's fascinating, and I'm sure everyone's probably heard of sperm whales feeding on giant squid. But it turns out if you look at the data, the giant squid are very very very, rare in the stomachs of these animals. And much more frequently, tooth whales, especially the large tooth whales, are feeding on, say, small or medium size squid, but they're feeding on them much more frequently.

So, for example, these large tooth whales, in particular beaked whales and sperm whales, they've evolved these incredible diving capacities. So several of these species can dive for more than an hour. They can dive as deep as a kilometer deep into the ocean. And that allows them to find really reliable hotspots of these medium-sized squid. And they can feed up to 40 or 50 times per dive. And so that's their solution to supporting their large body size. But there is a problem with that.

If you're limited by feeding on one single squid at a time, your ability to support larger and larger body size. becomes really constrained. And that's what we found. We found that because there is a lack of large squid, the energetic efficiency, and by that I mean the energy in that they get from all the food that they eat during a dive,

divided by the energy out, which is all the exercise and the resting metabolism, that starts to decrease when you get to the size of a sperm whale. And we think it's because there's this constraint that's imposed because there just aren't enough large giant squid to go around. And that's why the really giant whales then don't feed that way? They go to be the filter feeders? Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So if you're a filter feeder, large body size then becomes a tremendous advantage. And the large filter feeders are fascinating because they have these specialized anatomy that allows them to be basically feeding machines. They have this enormous feeding pouch that's highly extensible. And the feeding pouch is roughly, half the size of the animal, and it inflates with water and food as they take a single gulp of water. And for something like a blue whale, which could easily be 100 metric tons in body mass, they are practically doubling the size of their body because they're engulfing a volume of water in krill

that's larger than their own body. Wow. So because of that, because of that specialized mechanism to filter feed in this tremendous, what we call engulfment capacity, they can get a tremendous amount of food per feeding event. And because smaller animals like Krell are much more abundant than, say, very large giant squid, the limitation really doesn't appear to be there, at least in terms of these very productive summer months, where baleen whales can be found in feeding very intensely all day long. So you're saying that whales relatively, I mean, three million years grew to such enormous sizes,

And you say there's really no limit to the size that the baleen whales can grow to. Could we expect them to get bigger over time? Oh, yeah. I mean, that's the next question that I'm really fascinated by is, is are we looking at a snapshot in time where large baleen whales are in the process of evolving even greater body sizes? Because it's only been a few million years. So it's pretty amazing that they've evolved that body size so quickly. and I think that's another reason why it's important to study these animals get this basic data

so we can ensure that we can conserve these animals and make sure our kids and their grandkids can see and enjoy these amazing animals. Speaking of which, conserving the future, is climate change and the crisis and the climate affecting the oceans? Is that possibly going to affect the future of the baleen whales and all the whales? I think that's a good question. I don't think there's great data to say one way or another, whether we're going to have winners and losers among the great whales. I'm hopeful because I've seen that a lot of these species have very flexible foraging strategies, like humpback whales seem to be doing very well.

They can feed on a lot of different prey. It appears that they can switch between krill feeding and fish feeding, for example. But it also might be a hard time to be a large whale, in an urban ocean ecosystem. There are cargo ships that go pretty fast. They're very loud. Maybe they can mask the calls between individual whales. Maybe whales might get hit by ships.

Maybe they get entangled in fishing gear. So there are some threats that I think we need to make sure we can measure their impacts. But I'm pretty hopeful that a lot of these species will do pretty well in the future. You know, everything you talked about is how fascinating these big creatures are, these big whales. And one of the most fascinating parts I found about one of the papers that you recently published was that the heart rate of the blue whales is really, really slow. How slow is it? Yeah. Well, what was amazing about that paper? And we were just amazed that this worked at all. So basically, we had a very similar tag, so a suction cup attached tag. So there's four

suction cups that hold this little computer to the whale's body. And in two of those suction cups, we had surface electrodes similar to what you might have in the doctor's office. And just from those two electrodes alone, and when we got the tag in just the right place on the left side of a blue whale's body, just behind the left flipper, we were able to detect and measure heart rate. And what was really fascinating is when those blue whales were diving to depth. This is about a 10 to 15 minute dive, diving to about 100 to 200 meters in depth. And then feeding. What was really fascinating is that they drop their heart rate down to about two beats per minute.

So that's incredibly low. Two beats per minute, not per second. Yeah, absolutely. What was more fascinating is when they take this big gulp of water, it's a very expensive behavior. I mean, if you just think about the physics of that, accelerating the high speed, going up to about five meters per second, lowering their jaws at high speed, there's a lot of drag involved. They decelerate as they're inflating this pouch. So there's a lot of energy that's required. And they, even though when they took that gulp of water, they did raise the heart rate from that

low bottom of two beats per minute a little bit. So they doubled it up to about four to five beats per minute, but it still stayed very low. But what's even more fascinating than that is what happened at the sea surface. So when they go back up to the sea surface, they take a series of breaths. So they're reloading their oxygen stores. The heart rate then goes all the way up to about 35, 36, 37 beats per minute. And so that's a pretty big range, if you just think about that range. But also, when we looked at the duration of the heartbeat itself, it was almost too

seconds in duration. Wow. So it appears that their heart rate is at maximum. Let me just drop in and say, Am I Refleator? This is Science Friday from WNIC Studios. And that's a maximum heart rate during routine foraging behavior.

And this is something Blue Wells do all day long. They do these deep dives. They go back up to the surface. As soon as they're done, taking about 10 breaths, they go back down, they keep feeding. So that sort of begs the question, Are these animals at some type of physiological extreme? Are they at the biggest they can be?

How can you make a circulatory system and a heart that can meet these types of energetic demands? And I would also say knowing from work we've talked about with whales on land, I mean, with whales, with elephants on land, I mean, we know there's a size on land where as you grow, you grow exponentially, right? And you can't get rid of your heat well enough. So there's a limit. Is there a limit in the ocean? I would think the water dissipates the heat so well, you can get much bigger. Yeah, my guess is that the heat constraints may not be as much of a problem compared to terrestrial animal

because, well, large whales still have blubber, so it appears they still need that to have that blubber in order to retain heat. But also what's really fascinating is that a lot of these, a lot of marine mammals are well known to have thermal windows. So they can basically dedicate some blood flow to an extremity like a flipper or a fluke, and they can basically dump heat that way, or they can constrict flow to that surface as well if they don't want to dump that heat. So I think they have some specialized mechanisms that allow them to thermoregulate, whether they need to dump heat or whether they need to keep that heat in. So my guess is there are ways around some of those constraints,

but indeed, as you get bigger, your surface area relative to your volume, certainly is an interesting question. I've got it about less than a minute. I want to know what the one main question you still haven't answered is. Oh, how do whales find food? I think is the, maybe it's a $10 million question at this point. It's really fascinating. So, for example, blue whales will migrate across the ocean and somehow find these really dense patches of krill. Is it a memory-based process? Can they, perhaps can they smell where the food is? Dimethyl sulfide has been implicated in being associated with a lot of these krill resources. Maybe they just, it's trial and error.

Who knows? Yeah, so I think that's the next big question. Thank you very much. Fascinating stuff about the whales. Dr. Jeremy Goldbogan is assistant professor of biology at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Lab. He joins us from the studios of K-A-ZU in Monterey, California. One last thing before we go, we're hard at work on our big end of the year show. And this year we're not only recapping science from 2019, but the best moments in science from the whole decade.

Yeah, it's the end of the decade, and we need your help. We want you to go to the Science Friday Vox Pop app. Tell us what science story or discovery you remember most from the last 10 years, just like Michael from Colorado did. My biggest moment in science in the past decade was the great. American eclipse of August 21st, 2017. What an amazing experience. That's the Science Friday Voxpop app, and you could be included in our big end of year, end of decade science wrap-up. That's about all the time we have for today. I want to remind you, you know, to the Gemini Meteor shower peaks tonight, Friday night, and into Saturday. You can catch a display if you want to. And of course, you can

listen to Science Friday all week on our apps and a social community and everything else. So have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato in New York.