Recently, they have not been pampered with attention. Much is said about smart, quick-witted and cheerful dolphins, about good-natured giants whales, but for some reason not a word about the noble knights of the seas, sperm whales. Maybe because not everyone has read Henry Melville's amazing novel about the white sperm whale "Moby Dick".
How did he deserve the special attention of the writer? Yes, even in the fact that the sperm whale, although it belongs to the cetacean family, is sharply different from all the inhabitants of the Earth, both underwater and land. It can rightfully be called the most mysterious animal. It is arranged somehow completely wrong, in any case, it is completely incomprehensible to us.
Whales are not fish, but mammals that have to float up to take a breath of air. They hide under water only for a short time and reach shallow depths, and then float, otherwise they will suffocate and die. But for the sperm whale, general rules are not written. He can stay underwater for at least an hour and dive to a depth of one kilometer.
Some sources point to the possible ability of the sperm whale to dive even up to 3000 meters. Maybe there are no depth limits for the sperm whale at all? Of course, not a single whale can even dream of such feats. 25-30 meters is the depth of their residence.
The sperm whale descends to very great depths, and there is a huge pressure - up to 100 atmospheres, it should have, like a monstrous press, flattened the sperm whale into a cake, but no! He pops up, alive and well.
Well, if he stays under water for a long time, then he must store a lot of air, which means that the lungs of the sperm whale must be - whoa! Not at all. He has them even two times less than other whales. What does he breathe for so long - no one knows for sure.
Promotional video:
It is assumed that his air reserves accumulate in the muscles, as well as in the air sac in the overgrown nostril. All creatures, large and small, have two nostrils. And only the sperm whale has one, the left. Once upon a time, however, there was also a right one, but it has long been overgrown.
With air, too, everything is not entirely clear. All divers are aware of decompression sickness, when nitrogen, captured by the lungs together with the air inhaled from the cylinders, passes under high pressure into the blood, and from it into the tissues of the body. As they rise quickly to the surface, microscopic nitrogen bubbles are released and clog the small blood vessels. Severe poisoning sets in, which brings severe suffering, and often death.
The same fate, it seems, should be prepared for the sperm whale, because he is not "from another test", and the laws of physics exist for him. But the sperm whale jumps out of the depths at a terrible speed, like a torpedo, and nothing is done to him! How this is possible is one of his secrets. It is believed that the blood plasma of the sperm whale has an increased ability to dissolve nitrogen, preventing this gas from forming microbubbles.
And everything else he has is strange and inexplicable, as if it were some kind of alien, not terrestrial animal. For example, he has the longest intestine in the world - 160 meters! And why should he? It is not known at all. This is one of the unanswered mysteries, because carnivores generally have much shorter intestines than herbivores.
But this intestine contains ambergris - a precious substance for people, but what the sperm whale uses it for, no one really knows. According to the most common version now, ambergris is secreted as a result of irritation of the intestinal mucosa caused by the horny beaks of squid swallowed by the sperm whale, in any case, in pieces of ambergris, you can always find many undigested cephalopod beaks.
But for many decades, scientists have not been able to establish whether ambergris is a product of normal life activity or the result of pathology. However, it is noteworthy that ambergris is found only in the intestines of males.
In the huge head of a sperm whale, which is just right to be used as a battering weapon, a white liquid accumulates - spermaceti, which easily heals any wounds (there were even legends about it as a miraculous medicine that cured all diseases). In the first half of the 20th century, spermaceti was used in perfumery and medicine, including for the preparation of anti-burn ointments. Nowadays, natural spermaceti is no longer produced and used.
But why spermaceti sperm whale? Moreover, this is a unique formation in the world of cetaceans, available only in sperm whales. According to one recent theory, it helps to give direction to sound waves during echolocation. But this body clearly has other functions. Sometimes it is believed that the spermaceous organ can serve for cooling, that is, removing some of the heat from the body of the sperm whale.
It is also possible that the spermacet-filled head is used by whales to absorb shock. Indeed, male sperm whales, in fights with each other during the mating period or when attacking enemies, strike first of all with their heads. However, females also have a spermaceti sac, so this issue has not been completely resolved.
Or here's another riddle. In the old days, they talked about people swallowed by whales and then miraculously escaped. The Bible tells about the adventures of Saint Jonah, who was swallowed by a huge whale, but he fervently prayed to the Lord, and he saved him.
All these legends do not refer to huge baleen whales - blue and humpback whales, but to old sperm whales, whose weight reaches 50, or even 100 tons. They, indeed, are able to swallow a person whole, which they sometimes do.
At the same time, sperm whales do not injure a person, although with their four-meter lower jaw with huge teeth (the weight of each of these "teeth" is 3 kilograms) they could have a snack and grind anyone into pieces. Why are they so careful with people?
Maybe they are just rescuing them in trouble, like dolphins do? But they do it in their own way, the only way they can.
At least one case of a miraculous rescue is reliably known, in which the whaler James Bartley from the schooner "Star of the East" became a participant. The sperm whale, apparently taking the ship and the boat with the sailor for their implacable enemies, squid, attacked them. He made a hole in the schooner with a blow of his head, and overturned the boat.
He swallowed the sailor who fell out of the boat. The whalers managed to cope with the hole in the side of the ship, after which they harpooned the sperm whale. When his carcass was taken aboard and the belly was opened, they found Bartley there, whom everyone already believed dead. The sailor seemed to be asleep. They shook him by the shoulder and woke up.
In general, James was not injured, he just faded somehow. Either from fear, or the gastric juices of the sperm whale etched all the colors out of him.
However, it was this acquired characteristic that Bartley turned to his advantage. He quit his job on a schooner and began to travel to fairs, where he showed himself for money as a living curiosity: wow, he was in the stomach of a sperm whale and survived! Naturally, on his own behalf, he added a lot of "creepy" details so that onlookers paid more.
Well, now the most important thing! Why do sperm whales dive to a kilometer depth when there is a wide variety of food around them? The more you think about it, the more inevitably you come to the conclusion that the knight of the seas, as if specially prepared by nature for deadly fights, is looking for a meeting with his old and sworn enemy - a giant squid in order to fight him and tear his slimy body with insidious eyes to pieces - plates.
But the outcome of the battle, alas, is not always clear. There is a known case when a sperm whale was caught, which swallowed a squid so large that its tentacles did not fit in the belly of a whale, but protruded outward and sucked on the snout of the sperm whale. This squid weighed about 200 kg.
Also, on the skin of sperm whales, traces of suckers of squid 20 cm in diameter are sometimes found. At the same time, even the largest squid known to science (even those whose length, together with tentacles, reached 10 meters), the diameter of the suckers does not exceed 5 cm. Do unknown giants meet sperm whales in the mysterious ocean depths?