As we grow, we go from eating small meals to much bigger ones – think of the transition from a kid’s meal to an adult’s one in a fast food chain – in line with the requirements of our bodies. A bigger body, especially a growing one, needs more food.

That much is plain to see.

So as an adult we tend to eat three square meals a day, which is sufficient to sustain our bodies and ideally give it all the nutrients it needs to keep it functional and healthy.

But if we were significantly larger, this simply wouldn’t be sufficient – and for the biggest of our planet’s animals, whales, the constant availability of food is absolutely essential to maintaining ample body weight to allow them to thrive.

Think of it as trying to sustain yourself solely on grains of rice, one at a time. You’d need to eat so many of them to try to keep yourself full. And for whales, who eat small sea creatures like krill, near-constant feeding is required, especially at certain times of year, to sustain them.

But is there enough food? And what if that food source runs out? That is the question that an international team of researchers determined to answer, in a study of short-finned pilot whales (Globicephala macrorhynchus) and consume not krill, but squid.

To study the animals, the research team attached data-collecting tags – which were fitted with motion sensors, a camera, GPS, and hydrophones – to eight short-finned pilot whales using suction cups to minimise effects of the whales, as the team explained in a recent statement.

After detaching the tags, the researchers were able to unravel the data and begin to understand the whales’ hunting and feeding habits: and their results were astounding.

Not only did the whales dive as deep as 864 meters below sea level in their quest for sufficient squid to satiate their hunger, they made these dives – which use considerable energy – around 39 times every day.

The scientists were able to interpret the echolocation clicks the whales made when diving to understand how many squid they’d consumed – an average of four for every dive – to figure out just how many squids the whales ate every day.

The estimate – between 82 and 202 squid per whale per day – doesn’t sound like much when you consider the size of a whale. But the realisation that each squid was eating 73,730 squid every year – or 88,000 tonnes of squid for the whole population of short-finned pilot whales living off the coast of Hawai’i – really puts that into perspective.

Luckily for the whales, squid is abundant in their habitat, as the researchers conclude in their paper, which was published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

But in this habitat, it’s really not a good time to be a squid.

If you think that’s impressive, check out this story about a “goldmine” of lithium that was found in the U.S. that could completely change the EV battery game.