Part I: Seals teeth and whales ears - Scott Polar Research Institute ...

sperm whale work. Worked till eight o’clock – breakfast - then 08.30 to 11.40 on deck.
Then lunch break. 12.30 to 2.30 on deck followed by 3.30 to six o’clock on deck. It
was quite hard work too. To collect some of the specimens I had to use a felling-axe,
for example, cutting out a tooth (which may be up to ten inches long) from the jaw,
for later age estimation (according to the method I had discovered on elephant
seals!). Also, chopping at the vertebrae to see from the epiphyses whether a whale
was still growing or if it had reached physical maturity and stopped growing in
length. So I could expect to get very fit, in contrast to normal shipboard life. Later,
just writing up the notes and preparing the specimens took another three - four
hours.
I had done ten whales in all so far - only four that day. But it was interesting and I
liked to have plenty to do. What I didn't like was changing every mealtime out of
sea-boots, sea-boot stockings and overalls, washing blood off hands and face and
then walking to the other end of the ship and up and down about twelve flights of
steps to the mess room. But I probably took much more exercise than ashore in
England!
I would be going out in a catcher some time. They are fast boats (l6 knots), about
230 ft long with the harpoon gun in the bows, and a catwalk so that the gunner can
walk from bridge to bows without getting his feet wet.
A few days later, on 14 December, at lat. 50° S, 45 ° E. we were steaming along the
fringe of the pack ice. There was great excitement for me, because I saw my first seals
of the voyage - seven beautiful crabeaters - lying out on the floes. I thought then that
they would always be my first love in the animal world. There were great numbers
of birds, which were really attractive, although not brightly coloured. The Antarctic
petrels are brown and white. The cape pigeons brown and white too, but in a
different pattern and the blue petrel has slaty-blue wings, a bright cobalt-blue beak
and legs the same colours with bright yellow webs. It is very smart, distinguished
from the prions by a white tip to the tail feathers. The snow petrel was my favourite
though. In a snow-storm it looks just like an exclamation mark lying on its side –
comprising the bill and eye. The sooty albatross at night has just the small white ring
around the eye visible.
But maybe I ought to digress and tell the reader something about the sperm whale.
It is up to 55-60 ft long and its grotesque head is one third of the length of its whole
body. There is only one functional nostril, the left and the other has evolved into the
spermaceti organ or ‘case’, which contains the waxlike spermaceti. Only the pole-like
lower jaw has conical teeth, 22 on each side (which are used by the whalers for
carving penguin or whale souvenirs!). It can stay under water for an hour or more,
diving to 2000 m, and lives on squids and fish. The titanic struggles with squid are
reflected in large scars on the head and body, from squid suckers and claws.
The bulk of the population lives in family units (FUs) of females, calves and
immatures) in low latitudes, together with some socially mature adult males, which
seek out oestrous females in the FUs for mating. On reaching sexual maturity, the
males leave the FUs and increasingly (as they age) migrate South to the Southern
Ocean in the spring and summer months. There they are caught mainly during the
early part of the whaling season, before the ‘long whale’ season targeted on the
rorquals, but some are taken then in the absence of rorqual catches. The practical
problem is that the meat of the sperm whale is not edible due to the strong flavour of
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