304 WHAT SHALL WE EAT? 



that whales lived upon jelly-fish, the nearest approach 

 they could find to pumpkins; for the ocean is sadly 

 deficient in nutritious vegetables, and its denizens are 

 driven to a life of rapine unpleasant to contemplate. But 

 Mr. R. C. Haldane can supply us with new evidence upon 

 the diet of the greatest of all whales nay, the greatest of 

 all known mammals, extant or extinct the rorqual 

 (Balcenoptera musculus). 



The rorqual is not vegetarian; far from it. It is Mr. 

 Haldane's lot to live in the odoriferous neighbourhood of 

 three whaling stations which have been established in 

 Shetland for the special pursuit of rorquals, and he 

 devoted himself last summer to examining the contents 

 of the stomachs of the ' fish.' He had plenty of oppor- 

 tunity, for the bloody work was brisk ; no fewer than two 

 hundred and thirty-six whales, all rorqual except seven, 

 were accounted for during the season at these three 

 stations. He found that ' kril ' or cuttles and shrimps 

 millions upon millions of them were the staple food of 

 these giants between the middle of April and the middle 

 of June. Then the herrings came in, as much as two 

 barrels being found inside a bull finner on August 19. 

 Desmoulins told us long ago that he had seen six 

 hundred large cod and Lord knows how many pilchards 

 taken from the stomach of a rorqual. Anyhow, a thousand 

 herrings at a sitting must have been an agreeable change 

 after weeks of jelly-fish. Nevertheless, in a paper com- 

 municated to the Annals of Scottish Natural History for 

 April, Mr. Haldane says : ' I think that Finner whales 

 only eat herrings when kril and shrimps are not to be 

 got.' As for a sperm whale, only fifty-six feet long, which 

 was taken at one of these Shetland stations, it contained 



