| Don Plumley |
06-25-2007 01:27 PM |
Sorry - from Snopes.com:
Comments: This is a two-part hoax, the text having first appeared as a "Fact of the Day" on email joke lists toward the end of 2002. The attached image is of unknown origin and didn't appear until June 2003.
It should be obvious at first glance that the text and image don't belong together. How could the relatively small whale specimen in this photograph possibly produce 400 gallons of sperm at a go? By way of comparison, the capacity of an average hot tub is roughly that amount, 400 gallons, meaning that this poor creature would have to possess testicles twice the size of the rest of its body to live up to its reputation.
It does stand to reason that since blue whales are the largest animals on the planet, their reproductive organs should be of similarly impressive dimensions, and that is certainly the case: by one estimate, the penis of a blue whale can measure up to 16 feet long and its testicles weigh in at around 25 pounds apiece. But even packing 50 pounds of bollocks - the weight of an average-sized bulldog, if you need a benchmark - it's absurd to imagine that a blue whale, or any other creature for that matter, could produce 400 gallons of seminal fluid, or even one-tenth that amount, at once. (For another comparison, I found one source stating that the southern right whale - which has testicles even larger than the blue whale's, weighing in a half-a-ton apiece - produces around 5 gallons of ejaculate in one mating session.) The statistic is simply bogus.
Then there is the question of whether or not the animal depicted in this photo is even a blue whale at all, which it appears it is not. Blue whales average at least 75 feet in length. Using the human beings in the photograph for scale, this creature is clearly quite a bit smaller than a blue whale and most likely isn't any kind of whale at all, but rather a whale shark. And since sharks don't have penises per se, we must further conclude that either this image has been doctored (though I could detect no obvious signs of that), or the spectacular appendage dangling between the animal's pelvic fins is one of its claspers, a pair of tubular organs with which a male shark fastens itself to the female and inseminates her during reproduction.
http://www.lebowskifest.com/images/N...poster_new.jpg
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