516 EXTINCT AND VANISHING MAMMALS 



usually lighter than in the finback, but sometimes darker. 

 The midventral region is white about as far back as the middle 

 of the body and considerably in advance of the ends of the 

 throat folds. The whalebone is distinctive in being black, and 

 fraying into fine white fibers at the free end of the plates. 



Harmer (1928) states that this species is "found rather 

 farther from the poles than the Fin Whale, as a general rule, 

 and is thus specially numerous off such localities as Cape 

 Colony, Natal, and Angola in the south, and Japan and Nor- 

 way in the north. It appears in tropical records from the 

 French Congo and Ecuador . . . The numbers of this 

 species in successive seasons are often very unequal. " It feeds 

 chiefly on small pelagic crustaceans. It is apparently nowhere 

 so common as the finback but may be expected in the temperate 

 seas of the world. 



Although described by Rudolphi early in the nineteenth 

 century, little was known of this whale until about 1881. In 

 August of that year, Svend Foyn, who had previously paid 

 little attention to these whales because of their small size, 

 captured one in Varanger Fjord. In 1882 a whaling station 

 was established at Sorvaer, near Hammerfest, western Fin- 

 mark, and here the Sei whale proved to be a common species 

 and became the object of a regular fishery. In the spring of 

 1885, according to Collett, it appeared "by thousands" along 

 the entire Finmark coast and continued until early in Septem- 

 ber; another great invasion took place in the same waters in 

 1898. In 1903 Dr. F. W. True reported that four Sei whales 

 had lately been taken at the whaling station in Placentia Bay, 

 Newfoundland. In 1912, when Dr. Roy C. Andrews visited 

 the whaling stations in Japan, he found the whalers taking it 

 there and adduced reports of its capture at the Vancouver 

 Island station in May, 1913. Meanwhile the first one to be 

 reported from South African waters was taken off Saldanha 

 Bay, Portuguese West Africa. Since these earlier reports, the 

 Sei whale has been found to occur commonly in the southern 

 oceans, as about South Georgia, where it is taken in numbers 

 by the whalers in some seasons, while in others it appears to be 

 nearly absent. Thus in the 16 seasons from 1913 to 1929, a 

 total of 1,318 Sei whales was taken at South Georgia, of which 

 93 percent were killed in the months of February, March, and 

 April (the southern summer), considerably after the peak 



