Today I will talking about the Sperm Whale (a.k.a. real life submarines)! These incredible animals are the largest of the toothed whales! An adult can grow up to 40-60ft long and weigh approximately 77,000 lbs up to a wapping 130,000 lbs! Not to mention they can live to be 60-70 years old! Their brains are 6x larger than humans brains, making theirs one of the largest brains on the planet and the weight of their heart is equal to that of two grown men! How’s that for size. Sperm whales are well adapted to diving to depths of 2,000 to even 4,000ft to hunt for prey such as their favorite giant squid as well as octopus, benthic fish, shrimp, and crabs. They inhabit both tropical and polar regions of the open ocean. They are family oriented whales living in pods that will all dive down together to hunt and come back up together, as pictured. Named so because old time whalers thought the spermaceti organ in their heads produced sperm. However it produced a high quality oil that became exploited as a source of fuel and added to their status of becoming and endangered species. Fun fact: the whale in the acclaimed Moby Dick novel was a Sperm Whale! Other, more current threats that are impacting these animals is the inverse consumption of plastics in the ocean. On Nov 20th a dead sperm whale washed up near Kapota Park, Indonesia with 13lbs of plastic trash in its stomach! That’s absurd!!! No animal deserves to meet an untimely end by these means that we as humans are 100% to blame for! You may not think your one plastic cup could harm an animal, but if you don’t recycle it or refuse to use it in the first place... you don’t know where it will end up!!! So I ask you to please consider #saynotosingleuse! Take small steps with it gradually cutting things out, like first buying a reusable water bottle!
Originally posted on 16 December 2018
(not my pictures)
There are also 3 sperm whales in the last picture
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