Word: whaled
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What is a whale's spout made of? One theory: the spout is condensed vapor from the whale's moist breath. But in the tropics, where breath does not condense, the whale's spout is just as visible as in arctic cold. In Britain's Nature, Dr. F. C. Fraser and P. E. Purves tackle the old controversy again...
...Fraser-Purves theory: the spout is foam (mucus, gas and globules of emulsified oil) that forms in the whale's lungs. When the whale surfaces after a dive and empties its lungs, the foam expelled is the visible spout...
When a human diver descends to great depths, the nitrogen in his lungs tends to dissolve in his blood. When he comes to the surface, it forms bubbles that clog the circulation. This might not happen to whales if their lungs were full of oily foam. Oil has an affinity for nitrogen; it can absorb six times as much as blood can. Fraser & Purves think that when a whale dives, the nitrogen in the air of its lungs is absorbed by oil droplets before it gets into the blood. So the whale makes a deep dive and surfaces without suffering...
...habitat but have begun to develop it since they migrated to Israel and adopted its high-fat diet. Yet the amiable, blubber-eating Eskimos throw a monkey-wrench into the dietary-fat theory. In Alaska, they live for months at a time on the fat of island seal and whale, but even among their oldsters fatal atherosclerosis is rare...
About eight years ago, the company decided that lack of food is not the factor that limits guano bird population. The cold Pacific off Peru is incredibly rich in life; besides such large items as tuna and whale, it contains about 25 million tons of anchovetas, the six-inch fish that is the favorite food of the birds. The company decided that the chief reason why the birds did not increase to the limit of their abundant food supply was that their small islands were overcrowded and not in the right places for harvesting fish efficiently. The birds cannot normally...