Whale Math

Knitting a whale begins with math.

I've discovered that while it's very easy to find out the length of a whale, it's a bit more difficult to find other measurements, like the girth, for example. After spending a few hours searching the internet, I still hadn't found what I needed. What I did find, however, is that life-sized inflatable whales are kind of a big thing. So, I sent out a bunch of emails to people and organizations that seemed to possess life-sized inflatable minke whales, explaining what I was doing, and asking them if they happened to know the girth measurement of their whale. Mostly people just said no, but I did have one response back saying that while he could not recall the measurement, he had actually made the whale himself, and he remembered that he had originally found the measurements for his whale by just measuring images of minkes and doing some quick math.

So, that's what I did. I printed a bunch of pictures of minke whales, some drawn images, and some photographs. I specifically chose photos where the entire length of the whale was visible from the side, so that I wouldn't be dealing with any foreshortening. I measured the length of each of these whales, as well as the "height" at it's widest point. As you can see in the image below, I used these two numbers to create a length to height ratio, and found the average of all of these ratios. I then used that average, along with the pre-determined length of my whale (28 feet) to calculate my whale's height (aka diameter), which I could then use to find the circumference of the girth at it's largest point.

The calculated diameter for my whale is 4.74 feet across, with the circumference working out to be 14.88 feet around.