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When I told a coworker about a restaurant called Beefsteak Charlie's, he was agog for days until he got a chance to go try the chow at a place where you got the usual steak-salad-baked potato AND all the cold shrimp you could peel from a huge tub of ice at the salad bar. (You didn't peel them from the tub, you peeled them at your table, and you could go back as often as you wanted for more).

And that's what my buddy found so delightful. To him, free shrimp with dinner was like letting a nine-year-old loose in the Lego warehouse and telling him or her "Take all you want!" He put a dent in the Beefsteak Charlie profits many a night as he shoved so much shrimp down his neck that his wife had to hose him off in the driveway to get the Old Bay and cocktail sauce off his shirt.

But now I have read about his equal. 

Whales the size of jumbo jetliners feed a lot, and it's not like they eat the next-smaller fish down the chain. What a whale eats for dinner (and late-night snacks) is the tiny stuff of the sea: zooplankton and krill (tiny crustaceans that survive in the oceans until a whale gets hungry).

Just as we say rice is the perfect side when you don't know what you want for dinner, but you know you want thousands of something, those big old whales gulp Buick-sized mouthfuls of ocean water, and with it, millions of krill.

The scholarly journal Nature put out a report letting us know that some whales eat up to a third of their body weight every day.

And, they didn't have to be so specific, but you know the rules: more food = more poop.  We don't think about this, but that becomes the fertilizer that helps grow marine plant life.  

 

A humpback whale feeds on sand lance in the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. (Elliott Hazen, Smithsonian Magazine)

Let's talk about the  North Pacific blue whale, for example. They won't mind us saying that they eat some 16 tons of krill per day.

16 tons is, to put it in perspective, the weight of a city bus. Pass the Tums!

And it's a valid segment of the food chain. More food in, more poop, so more phytoplankton (the microscopic food found in the seas that make up a snack bar for lots of marine creatures).

So it's all good down by Davy Jones's locker! Just remember to take about 65 tuna sandwiches per person when you go sailing to amuse the whales below.