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Today’s science lesson: Never play chubby bunny with a whale. I was never good at that game where you stuffed as many marshmallows as possible into your mouth, but the rorqual whales would be: The largest group of baleen whales has mouth nerves that can stretch to twice their original length to swallow shoals of fish.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia discovered the elasticity of the nerves, previously unknown, allows whales to essentially turn into giant “water balloons.” Whales in the rorqual group include the blue whale and the humpback whale.

“The rorquals’ bulk feeding mechanism required major changes in anatomy of the tongue and mouth blubber to allow large deformation,” explains UBC researcher Dr. Wayne Vogl, “and now we recognize that it also required major modifications in the nerves in these tissues so they could also withstand the deformation.”

Scientists now believe the same nerve elasticity may be present in other animal groups, such as frogs and chameleons.