This has been offered earlier in the thread and its the one thing I disagree with. I'm pretty sure that 'fear of storms' and 'fear of loud noises' and 'fear of white-hot bolts of light ripping through the atmosphere' were probably selected for way before whales were whales. I don't think this selection process has to occur with every new species so I don't think it's an easy "dead ****** whales".

True, but whales have to surface to breathe, and breathing is also heavily selected for.

Whats up with all these old threads being regurgitated?

read the sticky

Apparently it's a "resolved question" thanks to this fountain of information from smm6196:

I know and I think the answer is yea a bunch of whales have been struck by lightning. Just wanted to clarify that there probably weren't millions of sacrificial whales dying to learn to avoid bad weather.

probably like 3 adult whales and 1 child whale

Bumping one of my favorite threads in oot
10 years ago! We were so young.

Thanks for this suzzer

Phew, I was afraid the thread got bumped because of a whale lighting death.

It is scarily awesome how many posters are still around from ten years ago

I was thinking the exact same thing.

i figure 100s of thousands of narwhals have been struck by lightning with that lightning rod they have sticking out of their mug

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150...t-by-lightning

Unfortunate sea lions 'get struck by lightning'
For the first time, lightning is known to have killed a marine mammal

This seems really weird to me:
They're acting like any animal dying from a lightning strike is really rare. I assumed that happened all the time. These sea lions were on land, and it still warranted a 4 page magazine article in "Marine Mammal Science" which seems relatively legitimate.

Just knowing it could happen to a sea lion in the last couple 100 years makes it a lot more likely to have happened in the 50 million year history of whales.

*Unless* there's something weird about actually being in the water.

6000 years is not very long.

Oh yeah I forgot the original premise of this was Josem calling it 1000 to 1 that one whale has been killed by lighting in 50 million years.

Yeah, I wasn't posting that as a counter to your calculations. But I am surprised it's such an event that it happened. Your WAG was 5 whales a year, so there must be factors making it far rarer, or this wouldn't be news. Still, I have no doubt some whales have been killed by lightning, and think the OP really isn't grasping the magnitude of random chance played out over 50 million years.

My father in law just had his boat lift repaired, and the guys doing it showed up during a storm. This was fresh water, but the one guy said before a nearby strike they often feel enough current that it's uncomfortable. Whales and other sea creatures probably evolved to sense and avoid lightning as much as possible, but still, over 50 million years you're going to have some extreme bad luck or dud whales that get hit.

Well whales are a lot bigger than sea lions. Also they're generally (I assume) a lot further from shore where it's less likely to be noticed if one gets killed by lightning.

Yeah for sure - whales might avoid storms. There are definitely a number of x-factors that could push it way down. But never in 50 million years seems pushing it, and 1/1000th chance that it happened once in 50 million years seems ludicrous.

Another x-factor is maybe whales usually get hit somewhere that lightning doesn't kill them. But it sure seems like the blowhole is usually the highest point, which is always where lightning hits in a localized area, and that would seem to be a horrible place for a whale to get hit by lightning.

i mean these guys can get hit by boats and still survive, its not hard to believe they can survive a lightning strike. all the blubber and **** they have would help to protect their internal organs.

Unless the lightning goes straight down your blowhole like Luke dropping proton torpedos into the Death Star.

Has no one really looked at the science? Seems like the ocean would just absorb most of the energy with out effecting the animal. It's like getting punched by Mike Tyson but you have a couch to absorb 99.999 % of the energy.


I base this on my expertise of a semester in electrical class 20 years ago so you know it's legit.

Sir H,

I don't think anyone in this thread made a compelling argument either way about the underlying physics and mortality of the situation. Suzzer made good math based argument, and basically, the number is either "a lot" or "zero".

If Kramer can hit a golf ball in a whales blowhole, I am sure a lightning bolt has done it at least once in the history of the world.

Another interesting fact I stumbled across is that large chunks of the open ocean are considered deserts - due to the lack of nutrients coming in run-off from land. So *in general* this would suggest that stuff like krill would be closer to land - which is also where lightning is more likely to strike.

I think it's pretty silly that Josem still thinks it's just 50/50 between a lot or zero.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/...ocean/c4396zy/
He posted an example from a text book that is basically what we want:


From those equations, you have to substitute in the new right parameters:
I = 30,000 A, current in a lightning strike
dr = 0.5 m, shortest dimension of a whale (the diameter)
R = 500 ohms, skin resistance in salt water
Pgr = 0.2 ohms per meter, the conductance of salt water
D = distance from the lightning strike to the whale

Now plug in for the final equation here:


At D=2 meters, you get i = 0.2A, which is the high end of what it takes to kill a human. At D=1, it's an amp.

I see no reason lightning would be less likely to strike a meter or two away from a whale than anywhere else. This supports the idea that the whale would have to be at the surface to be killed, and it would have to strike very close, but over all this time random chance is going to get a few.