The sperm whale is a lover of warm currents which favor the giant squid and cuttlefish on which it lives, and although it has been taken as far north as the Aleutian Islands, Alaska, even there it is in the comparatively warm waters of the Japanese stream; it has also been captured in the sub-Antarctic near the Falkland Islands.
The squid reach a length of twenty feet or more and the whale sometimes has terrific battles with its huge prey, the tentacles of which, armed with deadly suckers, tear long gashes in the skin of the head and snout, leaving white scars crisscrossed in every direction. In Japan I took several enormous spiny lobsters from the stomach of a sperm whale, as well as the remains of a shark and seventy or eighty yellow parrot-like beaks of the cuttlefish.
Unlike the whalebone whales, of which the opposite is true, the male sperm is very much larger than the female, and an old bull will sometimes reach a length of seventy feet and weigh eighty or ninety tons. Such an animal is a truly colossal creature. The head of a sixty-foot sperm, which was killed by Captain Fred Olsen in Japan especially for the American Museum, was almost twenty feet in length, and the skull, when crated, had a space measurement of twenty-six tons; it was so large that it would barely pass through the main hatch of the steamship which carried it to New York.
The sperm has only a single S-shaped blowhole situated almost at the end of the snout on the left side, and its spout, which is like that of no other whale, may be easily recognized even at a considerable distance; the low, bushy, vapor column is directed diagonally forward and upward, and the animal blows much oftener and more regularly than other large cetaceans. A sperm may spout thirty or forty times when not disturbed, generally lying still but occasionally swimming slowly during the entire breathing period.
An anterior view of a young male sperm whale. The head occupies one-third the entire length of the animal and the lower jaw is much shorter than the upper.
When a bull is wallowing at the surface, the “hump” (corresponding to the dorsal fin of the fin whales) is first seen, and at regular intervals, as the spout is ejected, the nose appears some forty feet ahead. The length of time he stays at the surface, the number of spouts, and the interval between them are all very regular and thus the hunters, after a particular whale has been observed for a few minutes, know exactly when the animal will again appear and how long it will remain visible.
After its blowing has been finished, the head gradually sinks, the back and “small” are curved upward, the flukes are lifted slowly high into the air, and the whale goes straight down.
During the “big dive” the animal remains below from fifteen to forty minutes and when reappearing, if not disturbed, swims tranquilly along just below the surface at a rate of about three or four miles an hour. His body is then horizontal, with the hump projecting above the water.
When frightened and speeding, a totally different attitude is assumed and the great flukes are moved violently up and down; at each downward stroke the head sinks eight or ten feet below the surface but rises with the upward motion, presenting only the cutwater-like lower portion. The upstroke of the tail appears to be the more powerful of the two, and at the same time the broad upper half of the head is lifted above the surface. A speed of ten or twelve miles an hour can be reached in this way, which the whalers describe as “going head out.”