Whenever the largest animals on the Earth grab a snack, their heart skips a beat or sometimes even 30.

A team of Marine Biologists recorded a blue whale’s heartbeat for the first time ever. It was an adult male whale about 72 feet (22 meters) long. A blue whale's heart weighs nearly 400 pounds (180 kilograms) and is approximately the size of a piano!

They used the technique of suction-cupping a pulse monitor to the back of a blue whale and it was done at Monterey Bay off the California coast. The sensor was a plastic, lunchbox-size, shell equipped with 4 suction cups, two of them contained electrodes for measuring the whale's heartbeat.

The researchers watched as the whale dove and resurfaced non stop for almost 9 hours alternately filling its lungs with air and grabbing snacks. During those deep dives, its heart rate see-sawed wildly. Pumping nearly 25 to 37 times per minute at the surface to rapidly charge its bloodstream with enough oxygen to support the next deep dive. And almost 2 beats per minute at the deepest depths. Here between these low-tempo beats, the whale's stretchy aortic artery slowly contracted to keep oxygenated blood slowly moving through its body. And the measurements were about 30% to 50% slower than the researchers had expected.