MORE ABOUT WHALES
The possibility of protecting whales from wanton slaughter by man is,
no doubt, a matter open to discussion. Protection has, however, been
accorded to one particular whale in an exceptional instance. Passenger
steamers along the coast of New Zealand used to call at a station in a
narrow inlet of the coast, called Pelorus Sound. A black whale, said
to be of the kind known as Risso's Grampus, of about 14 ft. in length,
was apparently a settled inhabitant of this channel, and used to
follow the steamers and accompany them through the sound. He became
famous and popular, and was known as "Pelorus Jack." He was always
looked for and recognised by the sailors and passengers. Certain
savagely destructive persons on one of these steamers--to the horror
and disgust of the New Zealand world--made an attempt to shoot
"Pelorus Jack." It is stated, and believed by sailors, that ill-luck
consequently fell on that steamer. On its next voyage it was avoided
by the whale, who had never failed to welcome friendly and
non-aggressive steamships, and on a third voyage the steamer was
wrecked. The feeling about "Pelorus Jack" was so strong that his
Excellency the Governor of New Zealand, Lord Plunket, signed, on
September 26th, 1904, an Order in Council, protecting "Pelorus Jack"
by name for five years, and any person interfering with him was made
liable to a fine of L100.
It appears that under the New Zealand Sea Fisheries Act of 1894 the
Governor in Council is empowered to make regulations protecting any
fish. Although zoologically not belonging to the class of fishes,
whales are, technically and for all legal and commercial purposes
"fishes," since they are "fished" and are the booty of "fisheries." I
believe that no Governor, Council, or Secretary of State has power in
the British Islands similar to that conferred on the Governor of New
Zealand by a modern State which desires good and effective government.
Such power is needed in all parts of the British Empire.
The whales, as compared with their dog-like ancestors, are modified to
a more extreme degree and in more special ways than is the case in any
other group of which we can trace the history over a similar period of
development. This is connected with the complete change of conditions
of life to which these mammals ("warm-blooded, air-breathing
quadrupeds which suckle their young") have become adapted in passing
from a terrestrial to a marine existence. Other mammalian ancestors
have independently taken to a marine life and given rise to
strange-looking adaptations, namely, the seals and also the Manatee
and Dugong known as the Sirenians (so-called because they give rise to
sailors' stories of mermaids and sirens), but these are far less
changed, less modified than the whales. The whales have acquired a
completely fish-like form. They frequently have a large back fin, and
have lost the hind legs altogether. The horizontally spread flukes of
the whale's tail have nothing to do with the hind legs, whereas the
common seal's hind legs are tied together so as to form a sort of
tail. In the bigger whales, sunk deep in the muscle and blubber, we
find on each side well forward in the body (not near the tail) a pair
of isolated, unattached bony pieces, which are the hip-bone and
thigh-bone--all that remains of the hind limbs. The neck is so short
that in many whales the seven neck-bones, or "vertebrae," are all fused
into one solid piece not longer than a single ordinary vertebra, and
showing six grooves marking off the seven vertebrae which have united
into one.
The head is more strangely altered than any other part of the whale.
The jaws are greatly elongated--so as to give a beak-like form in
all--but this region is specially long and narrow in the "beaked
whales" known to zoologists by the name Ziphius, in which it consists
of a solid piece of ivory-like bone, which we find in a fossil state
in the bone-bed of the Suffolk Crag. Farther back the bones of the
face are suddenly widened in all whales and porpoises, and in many
these bones grow up into enormous crests and ridges. The nostrils,
instead of being placed, as in other animals, at the free end of the
snout or beak, lie far back, so as to form the "blow-hole," which is
near the middle of the head.
The circulation of the blood and the breathing of whales (including in
that term the smaller kinds known as dolphins and porpoises) is still
a matter which is not properly understood. When a Greenland whale is
struck by the harpoon it dives vertically downward to a depth of 400
fathoms and more (nearly half a mile), and occasionally wounds the
skin and bones of its snout by violently striking it on the
sea-bottom. It remains below as long as forty minutes. Physiologists
wish to know how the sudden compression of the air in the lungs in
plunging to this depth and the equally sudden expansion of it in
rising from such a depth is dealt with in the whale's economy, so as
to prevent the absolutely deadly results which would ensue were any
ordinary air-breathing animal subjected to such changes of pressure.
Man can endure without suffering an increase of pressure of the gases
in his body amounting to three or four times that to which he is
accustomed, as, for instance, when working in the compressed air of
"caissons." But the whale goes suddenly to a depth at which the
pressure is eighty times that at the surface! Then, too, man (and
other terrestrial animals), after being subjected (for instance, in a
caisson) to a pressure of four times that which exists on the free
surface of the earth, is liable to be killed by suddenly passing from
that high pressure into the ordinary air. The gases dissolved in his
blood expand like the gas in a bottle of soda-water when the cork is
drawn, and the bubbles interfere with the circulation of the blood in
the finer blood-vessels (of especial importance being those of the
brain and spinal cord), and the serious illness and the death of
workmen has frequently resulted from this cause. Accordingly, the men
who work in such "compressed atmospheres" are now made to pass slowly
through a series of three chambers, in each of which the pressure is
diminished and brought nearer to that of the normal atmosphere. By
spending twenty minutes in each chamber successively, the workman is
gradually brought to the pressure of the outer world, and his blood
prevented from "effervescing." But what must be the condition of the
gases in the blood of a whale which suddenly rises from 400 fathoms to
the surface? The whale suddenly goes, not from a pressure of four
times the normal ("four atmospheres," as it is called), but from
eighty times the normal, to the normal pressure.
Whales, and also seals, are provided with remarkable special networks
of blood-vessels in various parts of the body (called "retia
mirabilia" by the old anatomists,) and also with a thick layer of fat
under the skin, the "blubber" (some feet deep in a large whale), full
of blood-vessels. It has been suggested that these networks of
blood-vessels are related in some way both to the power of keeping
long (forty minutes!) under water without breathing, and also to the
freedom of these marine monsters from the deadly effects of rapid
passage from great to little gas-pressure. But it is only a
suggestion; no one has shown how the networks can act so as to effect
these results, and I am quite unable to say how they do so. Another
suggestion worth considering is that the whale completely empties the
gas out of its lungs by muscular compression of the body-wall before
diving, so that there is no gas left in the body to be acted on by the
increased pressure resulting from its sinking into deep water. I am
unable to deal with this puzzle myself, and I have not been able to
find any naturalist or physiologist who can throw light on the matter.
The toothed whales are nearer to the ancestral primitive whales than
are the whalebone whales. The latter are the more peculiar, and
specially adapted with their huge heads and mouths (a third the length
of the whole animal in the Greenland whale), and their palisades of
350 whalebone planks, some 12 ft. long, on each side of the mouth. I
may mention in parenthesis that, whilst whalebone has been largely
superseded by light steel in the making of umbrellas and corsets, its
value remains, or rather increases, on account of its being the only
material for making certain kinds of large brushes which are used in
cleaning machinery. The whalebone whales have, when first born, very
minute teeth hidden in their jaws; they disappear. Some of the toothed
whales have teeth only in the lower jaw (the cachalot), others (the
beaked whales, Ziphius, etc.) have only one pair or two pairs of
teeth. These are tusk-like, and placed in the lower jaw. Others (the
dolphins and porpoises) have very numerous peg-like teeth in each jaw.
Some of them feed on fish, pursuing the shoals of fish in parties or
"schools."
A truly terrible toothed whale is the large porpoise called the killer
(known to zoologists as _Orca gladiator_). He is the wolf of the sea,
far more active and formidable than any shark, about 10 ft. long, and
strangely marked in black, white, and yellow. He has jaws bigger than
those of the largest Mugger crocodile, and a tremendous array of
fang-like teeth. These killers hunt the Right (or whalebone) whales in
all parts of the world, in parties of three to twelve. They hang on to
the lips of their enormous "quarry," and once they get a hold, in
twenty minutes tear it into pieces. Often they satisfy themselves with
tearing out and devouring the gigantic tongue of their victim, leaving
the carcase untouched.
The narwhal and the white whale, or Beluga, which furnishes
"porpoise-hide" for boots and laces, are both caught in northern seas,
and form a closely allied pair, similar to one another in shape and
colour (the one white, the other grey), and of moderate size, about 12
ft. long. They both feed on cuttle-fish and minute shrimps, but the
Beluga has many teeth and the narwhal (with the exception of some
rudimentary ones) only a single pair, and these in the front of the
upper jaw. In the female narwhal their pair of teeth remain
permanently concealed in the jaw bone, and so does the right side one
of the male. But the left side tooth of the male grows to an enormous
size, projecting horizontally in front of the narwhal to a length of
seven or eight feet. It is a powerful weapon, and is formed of ivory
spirally grooved on the surface. The narwhal was called "the unicorn
fish" or "Monoceras" in ancient times, and its spirally marked tooth
was confused with the horn of the terrestrial unicorn--the rhinoceros.
Very rarely the right tooth of the male narwhal grows to full size
side by side with the left tooth. A specimen showing this
double-toothed condition is in the Natural History Museum. A most
curious fact, quite unexplained as yet, is that the spiral grooving on
both the teeth turns in the same direction; in both it is like a
spiral staircase in mounting which (starting from the base implanted
in the jaw) you continually turn to the right. Now, in all other
animal structures which have a spiral growth and are paired--one
belonging to the right side of the animal, the other to the left, as,
for instance, the spirally marked horns of antelopes and the more
loosely coiled horns of sheep and cattle--one of the pair forms a
right-handed and the other a left-handed spiral. They are
"complementary"; one is the reflection, as in a mirror, of the other.
Why the narwhal's tooth does not conform to this rule is a mystery.
It is a remarkable fact that only a few whales and porpoises eat fish
or the flesh of other whales. The large toothed-whales, including the
cachalot or sperm whale, and also the Ziphius-like beaked whales, live
upon cuttle-fish. And it seems that they know where to hunt for this
special article of diet and how to find it in quantity (probably at
great depths in the ocean), which naturalists do not. Many new kinds
of cuttle-fish have been discovered by examining the contents of the
stomach of captured whales. The sperm whale feeds on monster squid
and poulp such as we rarely, if ever, see alive or washed up on the
shore. The hide of these cuttle-fish-eating whales and porpoises is
scratched and scarred by the hooks attached to the suckers on the arms
of the great cuttle-fish, and a test of the genuine character of
ambergris which forms as a concretion in the intestine of the
sperm-whale is that it contains fragments of the horny beaks and hooks
of the cuttle-fish digested by the whale. The food of the whalebone
whales consists of minute crustacea and of the little floating
molluscs known as _Clio borealis_, as big as the last joint of one's
little finger, which float by millions in the Arctic Ocean. The
whalebone whales, after letting their huge mouths fill with the
sea-water in which these creatures are floating, squeeze it out
through the strainer formed by the whalebone palisade on each side--by
raising the tongue and floor of the mouth. The water passes out
through the strainer, and the nourishing morsels remain.
Some fossil jaws and skulls of whales from miocene and older tertiary
strata are known which tend to connect the toothed whales with those
mammals not modified for marine life. But the approach in that
direction does not go very far. The extinct whales called Squalodon
have tusk-like front teeth and molars which have the outline of a leaf
with a coarsely "serrated" edge. The bones of the face are also, in
them, more like those of an ordinary mammal than is the case with
modern toothed whales. The snout is not so long, and the bones which
form it are a little more like those of a fox's snout than are those
of the dolphin's "beak." But on the whole it is astonishing how little
we know of fossil whales. We have yet to discover ancestral forms
possessing small hind legs, but whale-like in other features. Some day
a lucky "fossil-hunter" will come upon the remains of a series of
whale-ancestors probably of Eocene age, and we shall know the steps by
which a quadruped was changed into a cetacean--just as we have
recently learned the history of the development of elephants. We know
even less about the ancestry of bats and the steps by which they
acquired their wings than we do about the history of whales. These
discoveries await future generations of men when "cuttings" and "pits"
and quarries shall have been made in the rest of the earth's surface
to the same extent as they have been in Europe and in parts of the
American continent.