GIANTS OF THE DEEP blue whale


The blue whale is the biggest creature that has ever lived on Earth. Although some dinosaurs were longer, none of them equalled the blue whale in terms of bulk and weight.


The blue whale is also one of the loudest animals on Earth. It emits protracted noises that are louder than a jet plane taking off. These sounds carry in the water for hundreds of kilometres, but their frequency is so low that they are only partly audible to the human ear.


example features everything from early submarines to deep-sea life, to sewage purification: ‘We’re not the experts and that’s why the books are so successful: we are working on subjects that are interesting to us and are excited about things that are maybe not so exciting to people who have studied the subjects for years. We don’t expect readers to remember everything that we put in the books – education now shouldn’t be based on remembering things because all of us have phones and can google everything any time; we want to do the opposite of googling, not kill curiosity or throw a lots of random information at readers but try to show how things work, concrete for example, which is used everywhere, is super-interesting and by conveying that maybe we will create future engineers, architects and builders.’


Until the early 20th century the oceans were full of blue whales. Later on, intensive hunting led to their almost total extinction. Nowadays they are protected, and their population is gradually growing again, though there are still far fewer than in the past.


Blue whales feed mainly on krill, which are tiny crustaceans. One individual can swallow as much as 4 tonnes of it daily.


Instead of teeth blue whales have baleen – very thin, densely aligned plates. They use them to strain the food that they take into their mouths along with the seawater. When they close their jaws and push the water out through the baleen, the tiny crustaceans and other organisms settle on it.


Despite their immense size, blue whales have a very narrow oesophagus – it has a diameter of only 10cm. So they are not capable of swallowing bigger fish.


baleen


‘We don’t like to think of ourselves as illustrators or that we have a particular style, though of course we do. Instead we always think about how things should look starting with the content – eg with Maps we knew that we wanted 100 images per map, so they’d have to be quite small, the lines would have to be quite thin and the book itself would have to be quite big. We knew we couldn’t use paint because it would be unreadable. The form should always be the vehicle for the content’.


blue whale


‘One of the most important things we learned while studying is that the worst thing an illustrator can do is to read the text and then draw the things that are in the text because those two languages are different teachers: if I want to say “I love you” it would be very hard to do it using images, and even if you try you will probably create some new kind of coded alphabet - like emoji for example. But by using images I can describe how things work or what they look like very, very quickly; if we can describe something through an image – this is the most important thing a picture book can do.’


Maps and Under Earth, Under Water are published by Big Picture Press, hardback, £20 each


The biggest blue whales exceed 30m in length and can weigh as much as 190 tonnes.


Blue whales rarely dive deeper than 200m below the surface of the water, but they do sometimes go down to a depth of 500m.


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Travel the world with the Mzielinskis’ best-selling MAPS and explore beneath the surface with the incredible Under Earth, Under Water


Packed with amazing facts and filled with stunning illustrations these are books to pore over and treasure.


UNDER EARTH


£20.00 Printed


in Poland


ISBN 978-1-78370-364-7


Aleksandra Mizielińska and Daniel Mizieliński


UNDER WATER


Aleksandra Mizielińska and Daniel Mizieliński


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