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National Geographic : 1911 May
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SHORE-WHALING: A WORLD INDUSTRY SKULL OF A BLUE WHALE SENT TO THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY FROM JAPAN there is little doubt but that most large whales can remain under water a con siderably longer time. Both humpbacks and finbacks, when two or more individuals are together, will frequently swim side by side so closely as to almost touch each other, leaving the surface and reappearing again at exactly the same instant. Also a school, when separated by perhaps many hundred yards, will disappear as though at a given signal, double under water, and rise again a mile away, all blowing at the same time. How they communicate with each other-for it seems that they must do so-is a mys tery for which I cannot even suggest an explanation. THE GIANT SPERM WHALE No mammal which inhabits the sea is more extraordinary and grotesque in appearance than is the heavy-bodied, square-nosed sperm whale, and I suppose no mammal could furnish a more inter esting study to the naturalist. At very few of the shore stations are sperms taken, but in the north of Japan, during August and September, they are killed in numbers (see pp. 434, 436, and 438). Instead of having plates of baleen, this whale carries a row of 20 to 25 heavy teeth on each side of the lower jaw. These fit into sockets in the roof of the mouth and assist in holding the giant squid and cuttle-fish on which the enor mous animal feeds. Since the squid 439
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