High Noon on the High Seas 205 



static tank in the head, an organ which will be explained a little fur- 

 ther on. 



The origin of the scientific name Kogia has puzzled many since it 

 was first bestowed on the creature in 1846 by the British zoologist 

 Dr. John Gray. The best explanation is that it derives from the name 

 of a corpulent and crochety old Turkish gentleman, one Cogia Ef- 

 fendi, who not only observed whales in the Mediterranean, but also, 

 by reason of his grotesque profile and unbelievably stuffy demeanor, 

 gave rise to our popular term "an old codger." 



The great sperm whale is certainly the most unique form of ani- 

 mal life that we know of on this planet. The more it is studied, the 

 more amazing it proves to be. Its habits are as weird as its anatomy, 

 but we unfortunately know altogether too little about the former. 

 Unlike the other large whales, it is a tropical and warm-water animal, 

 only straying into polar seas on rare occasions, and then apparently 

 by mistake, but it migrates just as regularly as the baleen whales. 

 These migrations, however, seem to constitute two distinct interlock- 

 ing processes. One is a sudden seasonal movement, by the females 

 only, to the southern limits of the south temperate seas, followed by 

 a slow return northward during which they meet and intermingle 

 with the males and younger animals, which, in the meantime, have 

 completed a semicircular sweep around the oceans travehng in a 

 clockwise direction. This is the more peculiar since the major ocean 

 currents follow a counterclockwise course in the southern oceans. 

 The explanation for this procedure, it has been suggested, is the be- 

 havior of the food of the sperms. This food is primarily open-ocean, 

 deep-water cephalopods — that is to say, squids, including the giant 

 Architeuthis, which may grow to a length of twenty feet, have 

 thirty-foot tentacles, and weigh up to fifteen tons — which either 

 drift with certain deeper ocean currents, or themselves migrate be- 

 cause of seasonal changes in the salinity or temperature of the water, 

 or because their food in turn migrates for these or still other pur- 

 poses. 



We are only now beginning to learn about the complex pattern 

 of currents and countercurrents which flow at different depths and 

 in all manner of contrary directions under the world's great oceans, 

 and it will be a long time before we have mapped, let alone explained, 

 the reason for them all. The sperm whales know them, and therefore 



