DISTRIBUTION AND MIGRATION 343 



leave warm waters, and are generally restricted to latitudes between 40° S. 

 and 40° N. Mature bulls, on the other hand, unless they are the leaders 

 of a harem, migrate north or south in the spring and return to warmer 

 waters in the autumn. Older males go closer to the poles than younger 

 ones, and are often caught near the ice. How far north or south they 

 migrate depends largely on the abundance of cuttlefish, and Tomilin 

 (1936) reported that, for instance, in the Bering Sea they rarely pass 

 beyond 62° N. (Cape Navarin), where the sea becomes fairly shallow and 

 cuttlefish correspondingly scarce (Fig. 186). Off Kamchatka, and par- 

 ticularly off the Komandorskie Islands, cuttlefish are particularly 

 abundant, which probably explains why some cows have been known to 

 venture at least as far as S.W. Kamchatka (about 52° N.). In the N. 

 Atlantic, on the other hand, females generally do not travel so far north, 

 and no Sperm Whale cow has been reported stranded farther north than 

 about 54° N., where a school of nine males and eight females stranded on 

 Neuwerk Island, near Hamburg, in December, 1 723. A predominantly 

 female school of thirty- two ran aground on 14th March, 1784, near 

 Audierne (Southern Brittany; 48° N.). All Sperm Whales stranded on the 

 British and Belgian coasts, however, were bulls, and so were the individuals 

 making up all the forty-seven strandings on the Dutch coast recorded 

 since 1255, including the most recent stranding in 1953. Male Sperm 

 Whales have been caught everywhere in the Antarctic but mainly at 

 about 25° W., between 30° and 50° E. and between 120° and 130° E. 



While calves do not journey as far afield as their fathers, they 

 nevertheless begin to travel over vast distances fairly early on, since even 

 harem schools migrate, though only within the warmer regions, moving 

 closer to the polar boundaries in the spring and nearer to the equator in 

 the autumn. Nor are the schools evenly distributed, some areas being 

 particularly populous, probably because of the peculiar distribution of 

 cuttlefish. Cuttlefish abound at the confluence of cold currents and 

 tropical waters, e.g. off S.W. Africa, and off the West coast of S. America 

 where the cold Benguella Current and the Humboldt Current respectively 

 carry up cold water from the south. The sea teems with cuttlefish, 

 especially where the Humboldt Current mixes with equatorial waters, 

 i.e. off the coast of Peru and off the Galapagos Islands, and it is here that 

 Sperm Whales appear in very large concentrations. No wonder that 

 whaling stations in Chile and Peru top the list of Sperm Whale hunters by 

 accounting for 27 per cent of the total catch (see Fig. 15). (Twenty per 

 cent of Sperm Whales are caught in the Antarctic, 18 per cent off Japan 

 and Korea, and 15 per cent off South Africa.) 



The fact that so many Cetaceans I'oam over such vast areas is not 

 surprising when we consider that their diet is found in most seas and that 



