BEAKED WHALES ARE STRANGE

BEAKED WHALES ARE STRANGE
Hanging above the entrance desk to the Pratt Museum in Homer Alaska is the complete skeleton of a very strange looking whale. It has two teeth, a huge ribcage and a back bone consisting of very large tall vertebrae. I asked the receptionist what it was. “It is a beaked whale”, she replied.

Not that much is known about beaked whales, and what is pushes the limits of what is possible for an air breathing mammal. Recent studies of one species, Cuviers beaked whale, revealed that it could hold its breath a whopping 2 hours and 18 minutes! No other whale comes even close. The Cuviers beaked whale also holds the record among all whales for deep diving—9,816 feet (nearly 3,000 meters)—or well beyond the previous documented record held by a sperm whale. At that depth the pressure on the body is a crushing 600,000 pounds per square foot—about the weight of ten fully loaded cement trucks per square foot! During its descent powerful muscles attached to the oversized vertebrae whip its tail flukes back and forth while its side flippers are pressed tightly into depressions against its body.

Beaked whales feed mainly on deep sea squid and deep water fishes by sucking them up, hence the almost total lack of visible teeth. The two tusks serve little more than the equivalent of antlers in deer which presumably the females find attractive and the males use in sparring with each other.

They find there way around in the deep abyss using echolocation. Like many other cetaceans, they have a brain that is as large or larger than our own, suggesting that they live complex lives.

Oddly, beaked whales can have as many as 13 stomachs.
Read less