Whales are large cetaceans.
A whale is a marine animal from the group of cetaceans that can measure more than thirty meters in length. The term comes from the Latin ballaena , in turn derived from the Greek word phállaina .
The whale is the largest animal in the world . It is a mammal whose forelimbs are fins, it has a single horizontal fin and in the upper part of the head it has openings that allow it to expel air.
Whale characteristics
In their jaws, whales have baleen (also called, like the animal, whalebones). These are flexible sheets located in a pair of parallel rows, which are similar to combs. Made of keratin, whale baleen allows food to be filtered: cetaceans open their mouths when swimming to let the water in and then, through the action of their throat and tongue , they expel it again, leaving the food (krill, crustaceans) , fish, etc.) retained.
Another peculiarity of whales is that their tail , due to its arrangement, allows them to rise to the surface easily. This is very important since the whales must rise to breathe, having the possibility of spending about an hour underwater .
Whales live about thirty years and usually have a single calf each after a gestation of twelve months. Typically these animals mate and have their babies in warm seas and then migrate to colder waters to feed.
The tail helps the whale to ascend easily.
Different species
The southern right whale , bowhead whale , and glacial right whale are some of the extant species of whale.
Another species that has attracted the most attention of humans is the orca , which is nicknamed "killer whale" , an expression that does not represent it at all. The killer whale is not a whale , but an odontocete cetacean that is part of Delphinidae (the family of oceanic dolphins ). In fact, the genus to which they belong, called Orcinus , does not have any other species. It is the largest known dolphinid in the world and has adapted to all oceans.
Whales in fiction
In fiction, the figure of the whale has a fairly important place, as well as other marine animals, such as the shark and the octopus.
In this case, one of the most important stories is without a doubt "Moby-Dick" , written by the American author Herman Melville and published in 1851 . Broadly speaking, the book tells of Captain Ahab 's travels aboard the Pequod , a whaling ship with which he tried to achieve his goal of catching a large white sperm whale.
The case of NOC
In 1984 a truly surprising discovery about whales and their abilities took place. A group of scientists from the National Marine Mammal Foundation in California (United States) began to notice certain strange sounds in the vicinity of the whale and dolphin tank, as if they were conversations between people, although they did not reach understand what they were saying.
A few days later, everyone was speechless when a diver came out of the tank and asked who had called him: no human had spoken to him, but it was one of the whales, called NOC, who had learned to imitate our sounds .
NOC was a white whale that went down in history for being the first to modify its vocal mechanisms to imitate the human voice . It is important to understand that to carry out such a feat he had to lower several octaves and modify the pressure of his nasal tract, among other adjustments in his muscles, since the way whales make sounds is very different from ours.