What is in a sperm whale's name? The sperm whale is named after spermaceti, a waxy substance in its head. A head can hold about 4 tons of it, and scientists are still not sure what it is for.
Whalers once mistook spermaceti for sperm, which is how the sperm whale got its name. Spermaceti was used in oil lamps, lubricants and candles.
Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick made a white sperm whale famous. Its whale seems to have been based on a real animal whalers called Mocha Dick.
The sperm whale is the largest of the toothed whales, but the blue whale and other large rorquals are bigger. An adult male is 49 to 59 feet (15 to 18 metres) long and can weigh up to 45 tons, and the whale is dark gray.
A sperm whale eats mostly squid, and it eats about one ton of food in a day. Its large teeth are in its lower jaw, and they are 3 to 8 inches long.
Sperm whales make clicking sounds and use echolocation to find food. In echolocation, an animal makes a sound that travels through the water, bounces off an object and comes back as an echo.
A sperm whale can dive deeper than 3,000 feet (about 1,000 metres), and sperm whales often dive down to about 2,000 feet (600 metres). Their deep dives last about 45 minutes on average, though a sperm whale can stay underwater for an hour or more.
Sperm whales dive deep down in the ocean to find food, and they are usually found in water at least 1,000 metres deep. A sperm whale's ribcage is flexible, so its lungs can collapse safely under the water pressure of a deep dive. Its muscles hold extra myoglobin, a protein that stores oxygen.
Adult male sperm whales usually live alone, except in the breeding season, and young males leave their family groups and live with other young males. Female sperm whales and their young travel together in groups, and the females help look after the young together. They stay in warm tropical waters all year.
A mother carries her calf for 14 to 16 months before it is born. The newborn calf is about 13 feet long, and it nurses for two years or more.
Commercial whaling from about 1800 to the 1980s greatly reduced sperm whale numbers around the world. The International Whaling Commission placed a moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986.
Words to know
- spermaceti: waxy substance
- echolocation: finding by sound
- myoglobin: oxygen protein
- rorquals: large whales
- moratorium: official pause
