224 WHALES AND DOLPHINS 



white below, but in the fore part of the body there has been, 

 as it were, a shifting of the pigmentation to the left side, so 

 that externally the right lower jaw is without colour, while 

 the left is pigmented. This asymmetry of colour, which 

 distinguishes the species, extends on to the head and shoulders. 

 Inside the mouth the right jaw is pigmented while the left is 

 without colour, and on the tongue also pigment predominates 

 on the right. The inner sides of the flippers are white and the 

 lower side of the flukes also, the latter character especially 

 distinguishing this species from the Sei Whale. For the most 

 part pigment is absent on the under surface of the body from 

 chin to tail flukes, and the whiteness of the skin is such that 

 an author describing it said that it made the sea-foam look 

 grey as it washed to and fro across the body of the whale. 



The whalebone reflects the asymmetry in the colouring of 

 the head, for the blades on the right side are white for more 

 than a third of the distance from the tip of the snout, the 

 remainder on that side and all on the left being coloured a dull 

 blue-grey with streaks of white and yellow. The frayed edges 

 of the baleen, both of the white and of the pigmented blades, 

 are a uniform yellowish-white. 



Mackintosh and Wheeler state that the largest Common 

 Rorqual measured by them, a female, was 80 feet 5 inches in 

 length, and they suggest that 82 feet is probably about the 

 limit of size attained by this species. As in the Blue Whale, 

 females are a foot or two longer than males of the same age, 

 and those found in the Antarctic are, on the average, larger 

 than those in the northern hemisphere 



The distribution of the Common Rorqual is world-wide, but 

 it does not appear to be such an ice-loving species as the 

 Blue Whale. In the Atlantic it is much more abundant than 

 the lattei species ; for instance, in the last year for which 

 statistics are available, while 385 Finners were taken by the 

 whaling companies in the Faroes, Iceland, Norway, coast of 

 West Greenland and Newfoundland, only 10 Blue Whales 

 were caught during the same period. On the coast of Natal 

 at the present time the numbers captured are second only to 

 those of Sperm Whales, and in Kamchatka, Japan and Korea 

 it is also one of the major constituents of the commercial catch. 



The method of feeding restricts the Finner to the smaller 



