Animals With Best Capacity To Hold Breath Underwater

Animals who mostly live in the water and have lungs, like marine mammals, birds, and reptiles can’t filter oxygen from the water, so they have to surface to breathe in and out. Here are the few animals that are best at holding their breath underwater.

Most people can probably hold their breath for two minutes. Humans are not designed to hold their breath. However, many air-breathing creatures are built for breath-holding. Some species, such as fish, crabs, and lobsters, have the ability to breathe underwater. Other creatures, such as whales, seals, sea otters, and turtles, spend their entire or portion of their lives in the water yet are unable to breathe underwater. Despite their incapacity to breathe underwater, these creatures can hold their breath for extended periods of time. 

Here are the few animals that are best at holding their breath underwater:

Turtles

Turtles can spend the entire winter in deep hibernation at the bottom of a frozen lake, not using their lungs at all. The turtle's secret is that it does take in a tiny bit of oxygen by breathing out of its highly vascularized buttocks during this phase of almost complete system shutdown. 

Sleeping Sea Turtles 

They can hold their breath for up to seven hours. 

Loggerhead Turtles 

They will forage underwater for up to 40 minutes at a time.

Cuvier's Beaked Whale

From a category of mammals, it can hold its breath underwater for 3h 42min. 

Sperm Whale

From a category of mammals, it can hold its breath underwater for 2h. 

Weddell Seal

From a category of mammals, it can hold its breath underwater for 1h. 

Marine Iguana

From a category of reptiles, they can hold their breath underwater for 30min. 

Walrus

From a category of mammals, it can hold its breath underwater for 30min. 

Sea Cow

From a category of mammals, it can hold its breath underwater for 20min. 

Emperor Penguin

From a category of birds, it can hold its breath underwater for 18-20min. 

Underwater, marine mammals slow their cardiac frequency. Some animals' hearts can beat up to 120 times per minute when they are not submerged, but only four to six times per minute when they are. They can have up to three times the blood of humans. They store oxygen mostly in their muscles and blood.

The Cuvier's beaked whale can stay in the water for the longest time of any mammal. Reptiles like the marine iguana and birds like the emperor penguin can also run fast.