HEARING 203 



published in the Bulletin of the British Museum in 1954. The final report 

 appeared in i960 (also in the Bulletin). 



The reader might wonder what is so peculiar about the hearing of 

 Cetaceans that scholars took 2,000 years even to get to the crux of the 

 problem. After all, the absence of external ears is not so strange in itself, 

 since they serve to capture sound waves through the air, and would 

 not only be quite useless in the water, but also spoil the streamlining 

 of the rest of the body by causing undesirable currents. There is nothing 

 surprising, then, in the fact that Cetaceans have no obvious pinna and 

 have only the smallest of external ear slits (though rudimentary pinnae 

 were discovered in a Beluga and a porpoise). The 'ears' which whalers 

 have the habit of taking home to put on the chimney-piece (Fig. 1 1 1) are 

 quite unrelated to pinnae and are in fact the whale's bullae tympani to 

 which we shall return later. 



Despite this deficiency, whales have always been kno\vn to be very keen 

 of hearing. Thus Pindar, who lived from 522 to 422 b.c, claimed that 

 dolphins could be attracted by a flute or lyre, and Aristotle (384 to 322 

 B.C.) expressed surprise that these animals fled from all kinds of noises, 

 despite the fact that, according to him, they lacked an auditory passage. 

 (This passage was first discovered and described by Rondelet in the middle 

 of the sixteenth century.) The first Japanese whalers used to drive whales 

 and dolphins into bays by beating against the sides of their boats with 

 wooden hammers, a method akin in principle to that used even now 

 during Preyserjag (see Chapter 3) . Formerly, the big whales were 'stalked' 

 by ships with softly purring steam engines, noisy motors being avoided. 

 Nowadays, however, they are hunted with ships with strongly vibrating 

 engines which cause them to take to flight. Fast corvettes then catch up 

 with them. During his whale-marking voyage aboard the catcher Enern, 

 Prof. Ruud of Oslo noticed that whales hit by marks showed hardly any 

 reaction, while marks that missed and fell into the water with a loud splash 

 sent them scuttling away with fear. They would dive abruptly and not 

 surface again till they were a long way from the danger spot. Obviously 

 their sense of hearing is far keener than their sense of touch. Similar 

 experiences have been reported w ith porpoises off Denmark (see Chapter 

 6), which seemed much more nervous of modern motor-boats than they 

 had been of earlier rowing and sailing boats - the noise of the engines 

 apparently frightens them so much that they dive to great depths. Even 

 a few slaps on the water with a stick are enough to make them change 

 course by as much as 90 degrees. Capt. Mörzer Bruins reported similar 

 behaviour of Sotalia plumbea, a marine dolphin from the Persian Gulf. 



How keen the Cetacean auditory sense really is, can also be gathered 

 from reports of dolphin hunts off the American coast. Once a school of 



