I tried my hand at drawing again.
Thanks be to  Cravenexx for giving me a ton of advice, enabling me to finish it in one sitting and teaching me how to get better at this. I hope you are well entertained.
In case the picture does not tell the story well enough, I added a small text that only took me 7ish % of the time the drawing did.

Please do comment :)


Atlas and the greenland sharks

Atlas was on the third of usually four or five hunting dives of the day. The over twenty meter long and unimaginably massive sperm whale had more than a cubic meter of space inside his insatiable meat grinder of a forestomach, but the two semi complete fillings of squid and a few unlucky dogfish it has received so far was not enough. However the resulting chyme coursing through his various stomachs and hundreds of meters of intestines amounted to both the weight of a mid-sized car and sufficient fuel to drive the enormous predator to dive to immense depth to pursue more prey.
Hundreds of lives had already been extinguished this day in order to get his caloric intake a little over the halfway mark. But when the over a century old marine mammal received a particularly welcome rebound from his sonar clicks, Atlas realised that dive five and maybe even four are about to get cancelled due to an imminent crowding of his forestomach.

A whole group of greenland sharks were hugging a ledge right at the border of a continental shelf where the proper deep sea began and where he had gone twice already to seek out his usual, much smaller but more numerous prey. He must have missed the sharks twice by now but their luck had run out. Once he had honed in on the minute differences in time of flight and frequency shift, his echolocation reliably guided him to an elasmobranch buffet. Precisely measuring the Doppler shift of the sound waves told Atlas that his prey was already fleeing from his approaching maw, but to his great delight and the demise of as many greenland sharks as he could fit, their sprinting speed was comically slow. These sharks could reach half a millennium of age, sizes well beyond what even Atlas could fit down his throat and were able to go several months between meals, while he needed them at a borderline avian frequency. All of this was possible because these sharks were cold blooded and inhabited waters which would freeze solid if they were not exceedingly salty. And this led to the one big anatomical disadvantage which was the only part that mattered to most of these sharks right now, as it was exactly what stamped their ticket to the great sperm whale’s belly: Their muscles moved in bullet time, compared to Atlas’ super charged warm blooded ones.
In his younger days the whale would have charged them with excitement, but by now he took pleasure in calmly swimming into a bunch of these slow paced sharks and scooping them up at his leisure. It was almost as if they wanted to be eaten and in case they actually did, he gladly obliged. In the more likely event they were utterly terrified as his opening maw sucked in one after the other, only for his massive tongue to usher the hapless former predators into his insatiable gullet, well, tough knuckles. A whale had to eat and about one and a half tons of greenland shark, packaged in five ish individuals was just what he needed. If the survivors were lucky, they would be gone by the time he had replenished his lungs and digested their brethren far enough to want to come back for dessert.

The first three he took were smaller and therefore slower. Size enables speed in the ocean, something the bus sized whale gladly pointed out as he casually scooped up shark number 4 as the third was still travelling roughly ten meters of throat to reach the forestomach, which was situated peculiarly far in a sperm whale’s body. Then, with his maw still agape and his tongue just in the middle of forcing the greenland shark into his eagerly pulling throat, Atlas pushed down his huge fluke, casting an even darker shadow on the nearby rocky ocean floor while he gained the speed he needed to simply slide his quickly emptying maw around his next prey.

He noted with no short amount of glee, that the last one he caught during this dive was a feisty, four meter long male. Even though Atlas was over a century old, there was a good chance that the shark he was about to swallow on top of his brethren and digest in his entirety before the day was through, was even older than him. That was a fun little factoid going through his massive brain while he got the crown jewel of his hunt started on his gastric pilgrimage, following many thousands of his long digested brethren in order to do his part and fuel Atlas’s enormous body. Potentially even to allow the old whale to take a fourth trip after all and finish up the other greenland sharks, if he could find them. There were almost ten of them at the beginning and they did look awfully tasty to him.