This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

My name is Robert Lamb.

And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with the second part in our series on the biological prodigy that is blubber, that subcutaneous blanket of the marine mammal world.

A lot of ways you could describe it, kind of a dynamic beer cooler worn underneath the skin of the whale and seal alike.

The interesting way that it's equipped with a hot, cold toggle switch that works by opening and closing the inner floodgates of blood.

So in part one of this series, we started off by talking about a couple of passages from the novel Moby Dick,

one from a chapter about whale blubber, where the narrator sort of does a mental dissection

of the body of the whale, and then marvels at what he calls this cozy blanketing of his body,

the blanket underneath the skin, by which the whale can, quote, be cool at the equator

and keep thy blood fluid at the pole. And the book deploys this as a metaphor for a way that

humans should be ideally, for how humans should try to cultivate a sort of stoicism or a form

of mental independence from the influence of

outside events. But in the literal sense, this ability to carry your own weather with you

is indeed probably the most amazing thing about blubber. Blubber is not just fat-based insulation,

but highly vascularized, dynamic insulation, which can keep the body

core warm in freezing waters, but open up those channels of blood flow within the fat to dump

excess heat when the whale is hot from warmer water or from exertion. Yeah, it's no mere coat.

If it were a coat, it would be some sort of high-tech living smart coat.

Yes, yeah, it's like it's cyber.

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