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 £100.

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 "vertebrÆ," are all fused into one solid piece not longer than a single ordinary vertebra, and showing six grooves marking off the seven vertebrÆ 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.