HUNTING THE BOTTLENOSE WHALE 



A herd will never leave a wounded comrade while 

 it is still alive, but swim away as soon as it is dead. 

 The hunters often take advantage of this loyalty, after 

 they are fast to a bottlenose, by harpooning a second 

 before the first is killed. The whales crowd about 

 the wounded ones, coming in the most mysterious 

 manner from all parts of the compass, and sometimes 

 ten or fifteen can be taken before the school is lost. 



The bottlenose appears to feed exclusively upon a 

 bluish-white cuttlefish about six inches long, for noth- 

 ing else has been taken from their stomachs as far as 

 I have been able to learn. Like the orca and sperm 

 whale, when a bottlenose is killed it almost always 

 ejects large quantities of cuttlefish from its mouth. 

 Judging by the length of time the animals remain 

 under water and their heavy spouts when reappearing, 

 they must have to go to a great depth to find their 

 food. The two minute teeth at the tip of the lower 

 jaw can be of no assistance whatever in feeding and 

 will undoubtedly eventually disappear altogether. 



The bottlenose is common in the North Atlantic 

 and Arctic Oceans, and although rare on the Finmark 

 coast are numerous about Spitzbergen, Iceland, Nova 

 Zembla, East and West Greenland, Davis Straits, and 

 Labrador. Near the Faroe Islands and Iceland they 

 have been most relentlessly persecuted and hundreds 

 of whales are taken annually. 



Specimens have never been recorded from the Pa- 

 cific, but Captains H. G. Melsom and Fred Olsen as- 

 sured me that they had seen bottlenoses along the 

 northern coast of Japan not far from Aikawa. Whale- 



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