Why called sperm whale

Even so, he believes the differences represent cultural variants among the clans. And in the Sea of Cortez, the focus of its attention is Dosidicus gigas , the jumbo squid.

I tell him I have not. Apparently, I am not worth talking to until I have read it. My edition of Moby-Dick has pages, but for Gilly, the rest of the book might as well not exist. Gilly, a biologist at Stanford University, studies the jumbo squid. They can swim more than miles a week and recently have expanded their range.

Native to subtropical waters, they were caught in by fishermen as far north as Alaska. There may be a couple of reasons for this. One is that climate change has altered the oxygen levels in parts of the ocean. Also, many top predators, like tuna, have been heavily fished, and squid may be replacing them, preying on fish, crustaceans and other squid.

No one knows the consequences of this great sea-grab, which extends not just to Alaska, but apparently to other corners of the ocean. The nonfictional relationship between sperm whales and squid is pretty dramatic also. A single sperm whale can eat more than one ton of squid per day. They do eat giant squid on occasion, but most of what sperm whales pursue is relatively small and overmatched.

With their clicks, sperm whales can detect a squid less than a foot long more than a mile away, and schools of squid from even farther away.

But the way that sperm whales find squid was until recently a puzzle. At sea, it hangs under a boat and sends out waves of sound at four different frequencies. Each organism has a different acoustic signature, and she can often figure out what sort of creature the waves are bouncing off of.

To do so requires a certain interpretive knack. Once, in the Bering Sea, her boat came upon a flock of thick-billed murres, diving seabirds, as they were feeding. The acoustics showed a series of thin, vertical lines in the water. What did they represent? Murres pursue their prey by flying underwater, sometimes to great depths. Benoit-Bird figured out that the lines were columns of tiny bubbles the murres expelled when their feathers compressed as they dove.

To understand sperm whale sound, she had to first establish how the whales use their clicks to find squid. But she thought it unlikely that the whales would spend so much time and energy—diving hundreds or thousands of feet, clicking all the way down—only to grope blindly in the dark. In a test, Benoit-Bird, Gilly and colleagues tethered a live jumbo squid a few feet under their boat to see if the echo sounders could detect it.

They found that squid make fabulous acoustic targets. Toothy suckers cover their arms; the beak is hard and sharp; and the pen, a feather-shaped structure, supports the head. Benoit-Bird was thrilled.

To see like a sperm whale is to get a glimpse of a world inhabited by much smaller animals. So you expand. You ask: What is driving the squid? The squid, it turns out, are following creatures whose behavior was first noted during World War II, when naval sonar operators observed that the seafloor had the unexpected and somewhat alarming tendency to rise toward the surface at night and sink again during the day.

In , marine biologists realized that this false bottom was actually a layer of biology, thick with small fish and zooplankton. The layer is composed of fish and zooplankton that spend the day between and 3, feet deep, where almost no light can penetrate. At night, they migrate upward, sometimes to within 30 feet of the surface.

The fish are well suited to life in the dim depths, with enormous, almost grotesquely large eyes and small organs, known as photophores, that produce a faint glow. The mobile band of life was named the deep scattering layer, or DSL, for the way that it scattered sound waves. Biologists assumed that the DSL creatures were at the mercy of currents, drifting haplessly, helplessly along. Sperm whales give birth to only one calf at a time, and at birth, baby Sperm Whales are enormous — over 13 feet 4 m long.

Because calves cannot undertake the deep, long dives that their mothers do, groups of mothers form tight bonds and share the responsibility of protecting calves at the surface. While one or more mothers dive, others stay with at the surface with the young.

Though whaling has all but ceased since , sperm whales have not yet fully recovered from this cruel practice and are still considered vulnerable to extinction by expert scientists.

They have, however, recovered more significantly than the other large whales and are the most common large whale in the ocean today. Several countries around the world have offered sperm whales some or extensive legal protection. Sperm whales are the largest of all toothed whales and can grow to a maximum length of 52 feet Sperm whales have one of the widest distributions of all marine mammals, living everywhere from the Arctic to the Antarctic.

Sperm whales are named after the spermaceti — a waxy substance that was used in oil lamps and candles — found on their heads. Sperm whales are known for their large heads that account for one-third of their body length. Sperm whales can dive more than 10, feet 3, m in search of their preferred prey, which includes squid, sharks and fish.

Female sperm whales form lasting relationships with other females in their family and create social groups around these bonds. Click here or below to download hands-on marine science activities for kids. Follow us facebook twitter youtube. Search Search for: Search. Ever Wonder Why? Search for: Search.

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