Diving Capacity — Duration — Odontoceti

Dive duration is an extraordinary physiological adaptation in Odontoceti. Cuvier’s beaked whale leads with dives of up to 137.5 minutes — more than 2 hours submerged — followed by Sowerby’s beaked whale and the sperm whale, both at 120 minutes. In contrast, the false killer whale remains submerged for only 18.5 minutes. No data are currently available for the pygmy killer whale and the melon-headed whale.

Chart Data Table

*Note: the body text states Sowerby’s beaked whale reaches 120 minutes, but the extracted bar values only show one 120-minute bar clearly attributable to sperm whale/N. bottlenose whale — worth double-checking against the actual chart image, since this article’s x-axis has 11 species per the header but 13 callout labels appear in the extracted list (a similar mismatch to what we saw in earlier multi-species charts).

References (with hyperlinked sources)

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