204 : The Atlantic 



This brings us back to the matter of whalebone. The right whale 

 has no teeth and doesn't need any. Instead, he has this material called 

 "whalebone" which is a special development o£ the palate or roof of 

 the whale's upper jaw. From this spot a great fringe of long plates 

 grows down into the cavity of the right whale's mouth. These plates 

 were made up of a material like cartilage with long bundles of fibers 

 growing through it. The fibers frayed out all around the sides and 

 margins of each plate. The purpose of this arrangement is to sur- 

 round the whale's mouth with a sort of screen of fibers that acts like 

 a sieve or filter. The lower jaw of the right whale is shaped like a 

 great scoop. In feeding, the whale swims along at the surface of the 

 water scooping up a great mouthful of it. When he works his jaw 

 and tongue the water is forced out between the plates and fringes of 

 the whalebone and the food for the whale is deposited in the fibrous 

 network. 



It seems strange that great creatures like the right whale, and 

 another whale very similar to it called the bowhead, which are the 

 largest among all living creatures, could live on animals that are so 

 small as almost to require a microscope for their identification. The 

 tiny creatures that nourish these great whales float at the surface of 

 the sea in enormous numbers. They are known to the whalemen as 

 "brit" and to the scientists as "plankton." Plankton, in unbelievably 

 large volume, develop rapidly in northern waters, particularly along 

 the margin of the ice fields. The presence of these little animals in sea 

 water tends to change its color so that northern waters rich in plank- 

 ton are very often green rather than blue. Sometimes the growth of 

 plankton is so rapid that great stretches of the sea take on a brown 

 or reddish look. In Greenland waters there are two kinds of plankton, 

 both important to whales: Euphausiids, these are tiny crustaceans; 

 and Calanus finmarchicus, this is a copepod. 



Studies have been made that show that there is a regular propor- 

 tion established between the number of plankton present in waters 

 and the number of whales that can be caught in any one season. 

 How many plankton that must be and how fast they must develop 

 can be illustrated by the following observation: the stomach of a sin- 

 gle whale has revealed the presence of 1,200 liters (or about 1,050 

 quarts) of this whale food. 



Inasmuch as the Greenland whaling fishery, in the days of its prime, 

 used to include hundreds of ships and inasmuch as each ship 

 expected to take hundreds of whales, to supply thousands of barrels 



