WHALES LANDED AT SCOTTLSII WHALING STATIONS 37 



ON WHALES LANDED AT THE SCOTTISH 

 WHALING STATIONS, ESPECIALLY DURING 

 THE YEARS 1908-1914 Part VII. The Sei-whale. 



By D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson. 

 {Concluded from " The Scottish Naturalists^ igig, page i6.) 



VII. The Sei-whale {Balcenoptera borealis, Lesson; 

 BalcBna rostrata, Rudolphi). 



The Sei-whale {i.e. the Saithe-whale), or Rudolphi's 

 Rorqual, is distinguished from the Common Rorqual or 

 " Finner " by a number of characters by its smaller size, 

 its shorter flippers, its narrow plates of baleen, its much 

 higher and more falcate dorsal fin. Naturalists were long 

 of recognising it ; and our exact knowledge of the species 

 only dates from Collett's well-known paper of 1886, in which 

 the first-fruits were given us of the results of the modern 

 Norwegian whale-fishery. The two species are perfectly 

 well known to the whale-fishers ; they differ considerably 

 in their commercial value, and (for one thing) the baleen of 

 the Sei-whald" is very much the more valuable, and commands 

 several times the price of that of the Finner in the Paris 

 market.^ 



The Sei-whale is a " plankton-whale," living chiefly on 

 Calanus and other forms of " kril," but not upon herrings. 

 The difference in diet, however, between it and the Finner 

 is not so complete and sharp as it has often been said to be ; 

 for, as we have already seen, the Finner's diet of fish is not 

 his only one, and perhaps not his chief one. 



During the seven years with which we are mainly dealing, 

 1 291 Sei-whales were landed at our Scottish stations, of which 

 number 714 were males that is to say, 55-3 per cent. An 

 excess of males seems to be the general rule, at least in 

 our waters, and in some years the excess is considerable. 



The following is a complete list of our captures from 

 year to year and from month to month : 



^ Cf. Haldane, A7W. Scot. Nat. Hist., 1906, p 136 ; 1907, p. 13. 



