FEEDING 285 



biologists believe that Belugas can detect smoke. Whether these reactions 

 are due to taste or to some other sense is, however, not yet known. 



Not only the gustatory sense, but the salivary glands also are usually 

 more highly developed in herbivorous than in carnivorous animals. Not 

 surprisingly, therefore, even the earliest anatomists to study the Cetaceans, 

 e.g. Cuvier, Meckel and Rapp, were struck by the rudimentary form or 

 complete absence of this gland in them. 



While no one really believes that Jonah could have lived inside a whale, 

 the one Cetacean stomach he could even have entered is that of the Sperm 

 Whale, for both the pharynx and the oesophagus (normal width 4-5 

 inches) of all other whales are far too narrow to admit a man. Big 

 Rorquals can probably distend their oesophagus to 10 inches, but even 

 that is not big enough to allow them to swallow a man. Killers, which 

 can s^vallow seals and porpoises whole, have a much wider oesophagus, 

 and the Sperm Whale which gulps down thirty-four feet long giant squids 

 could certainly have swallowed Jonah. Budker, in his book Baleines et 

 Baleiniers, mentions the story of a sailor being swallowed by a Sperm 

 Whale, but there is, of course, no authentic account of anyone ever having 

 emerged alive from such an ordeal. 



Through the oesophagus, the food enters the stomach, where the 

 digestive process really starts (in so far as it has not been begun by the 

 action of the saliva in the mouth, as happens in man). In most mammals, 

 and particularly in carnivorous and omnivorous animals, e.g. dogs, pigs 

 and man, the stomach is a single pouch. If we look at its inner lining 

 through a microscope, we see that in a small region near the oesophagus 

 it has the same structure as the epithelium of the oesophagus itself. It 

 consists of stratified squamous epithelium, more or less cornified, but lacks 

 a homogeneous horn layer, such as, for instance, is found in the epidermis. 

 The rest of the stomach is lined with non-cornified epithelium containing 

 a great many fundus glands which mainly secrete hydrochloric acid and 

 the enzyme pepsin w'hich breaks down complex proteins into simpler 

 compounds. In the pyloric region of the stomach (i.e. the region adjoining 

 the duodenum), the fundus glands are replaced by pyloric glands which 

 mainly secrete alkaline mucus. 



While the stomachs of herbivorous sea-cows and of Pinnipeds are 

 generally similar in form and structure to those of the Carnivores and 

 Omnivores we have just described, the Cetacean stomach is much more 

 complex, consisting in all species (with the exception of Beaked Whales 

 which we shall discuss separately) of three main compartments which, in 

 Odontocetes, communicate by means of very narrow openings, and in 

 Mysticetes by means of slightly wider openings (Fig. 166). The first and 

 second compartments (forestomach and main stomach) are wide sacs 



