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CHICAGO NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM BULLETIN 



Jidy-Aitgust, 19i5 



MUSEUM ARTIST AT WORK 



Arthur G. Ru^ckert, Suff Artist of the Museum, painting one of the mural sketches 



decorating tlie now completed Hall of Whales. The sketch illustrates how small killet 



whales attack a giant bowhead whale. 



have instead of teeth a whalebone sieve to 

 strain the smaller creatures from the surface 

 waters of the sea. Their principal food, 

 known to whalers as "krill," is composed of 

 various crustaceans, some no more than one- 

 fifteenth of an inch in length. Smaller 

 . schooling fishes such as anchovies, sardines, 

 and herring are also engulfed and strained 

 out of the water by these consumers of sea- 

 food. 



The staple food of the sperm whale, 

 largest of the toothed types, appears to be 

 gigantic squids rarely seen by man, which 

 are pursued in the twilight zone of the sea 

 at a depth of about 300 feet. 



Among the larger species of whales 

 represented in the one-tenth size museum 

 models are: The blackfish or pilot whale, 

 which swims in great schools of as many as 

 a thousand individuals that sometimes 

 become stranded in shallow water; the 

 killer whale, "wolf of the sea," which attacks 

 its fellow large whales as well as such 

 smaller creatures as porpoises, seals, and 

 penguins; the sperm whale, largest of 

 toothed whales; the pigmy sperm whale; 

 the right whale; Cuvier's beaked whale; the 

 Arctic white whale; the humpback whale, 

 most stout-bodied of all with a flattened 

 snout (a sort of Hermann Goering of the 

 whales), which once was of great importance 

 to the whaling industry; the California gray 

 whale; the slender finback or rorqual; the 

 sei whale; the little piked whale; the pigmy 

 right whale; the blue whale, largest animal 

 ever known to have lived either among 

 extant or extinct species on either land or 

 sea; the bowhead whale; the Atlantic bottle- 

 nose, and the narwhal which is armed with a 

 long straight spearlike tusk. 



The curious courtship antics of the hump- 

 back whales are well known to whalers. 

 An amorous pair lie alongside of each other 



and deal each other 

 alternate love taps with 

 their sixteen-foot flip- 

 pers. These resounding 

 taps make a thunderous 

 sound that can be heard 

 for miles over the sea. 

 The museum curator 

 serves so large a func- 

 tion as a question an- 

 ■iwerer to the general 

 public, as well as to 

 text-book writers, edi- 

 tors of encyclopedias 

 and magazines, and 

 reporters, that some of 

 the more familar ques- 

 tions and answers have 

 been drawn up below. 



Q. Are whales fishes'! 

 A. No. 



This is one of the 

 most familar of ques- 

 tions asked of museum 

 curators, and the reply, 

 that whales are not fishes, is sometimes 

 met with skepticism. The question, in fact, 

 involves the meaning of words and the 

 divergence between popular names and 

 scientific classifications, for in Old English 

 any creature of the sea was a fish. This 

 meaning of the word "fish" persists in 

 starfish, jellyfish, shellfish, etc., and these 

 creatures are much less closely related to 

 what the zoologist calls "true fishes" than 

 are whales. Whales and the true fishes at 

 least agree in having backbones as a 

 fundamental characteristic. 



Q. If not fishes, what are whales? 

 A. Mammals. 



Mammals have warm blood, hair, and 

 suckle their young with milk from the 

 "mammae." Whales have warm blood, a 

 few vestiges of the hair coat (sometimes 

 only two hairs), and suckle their young. 

 Whales are thus really more closely related 

 to mice and men than to fishes or reptiles. 



Q. To what other mammals are whales most 



nearly related? 



A. We don't know. 



The earliest known 

 fossil whales have 

 strong teeth, but they 

 are already wholly 

 aquatic mammals; our 

 best guess is that they 

 arose from the central 

 stock of mammals that 

 produced both the flesh- 

 eaters and the hoofed 

 mammals. There is 

 so little connection be- 

 tween the whalebone 

 whales (which have no 

 teeth) and the toothed 

 whales that it has been 



suggested that these two types had an inde- 

 pendent origin from land-dwelling ancestors. 



Q. What is the largest whale? 



A. The blue whale. 



Often known also as the sulphur-bottom, 

 this whale reaches a length of more than 100 

 feet and a weight of more than 150 tons. 



Q. What is the smallest known whale? 



A. The Yangtze River porpoise. 



This species reaches a length of only 

 about five feet. 



Q. What kind of whale was Moby Dick? 



A. The legendary white whale was described 

 as a gigantic sperm whale. 



Presumably it had grown white with age. 



Q. How do whales swim? 



A. By sculling. 



That is, by diagonal down strokes of the 

 tail. Undulation, like the side-to-side 

 swimming movement of a fish, does not seem 

 to be employed. 



Q. How do whales breathe? 



A. Whales breathe air {like all mammals). 



The "spouting" or "blowing" of whales is 

 the exhaled air made visible by the con- 

 densation of water vapor when it meets the 

 cool outer air and is released from the 

 pressure of the whale's lungs. Water is not 

 spouted out, as is often assumed. 



Q. How large is a baby whale? 



A. Depends on the kind of whale. 



But the newly born young is astonishingly 

 large in comparison with its mother. The 

 young blue whale at birth measures 23 to 

 26 feet in length and weighs three to four 

 tons. 



Q. How fast do whales grow? 

 A. Very rapidly. 



The young blue whale measures more 

 than 50 feet when it is weaned, about seven 

 months after birth. 



Q. How deep do whales dive? 



A. At least a half-mile below the surface. 



This species represents 

 of whales, and, in fact. 



THE BLUE WHALE 

 the whalebone di\-ision of the wlule tribe. It is also the largest 

 the latgest of all animals known on land or sea, either of living 

 or extinct species. 



