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Female beaked whales' teeth are hidden in the gums and are not visible, and most male beaked whales have only two short tusks. Narwhals have vestigial teeth other than their tusk, which is present on males and 15% of females and has millions of nerves to sense water temperature, pressure and salinity.
Mysticetes are also known for their gigantism, as baleen whales are among the largest organisms to ever have lived; they reach lengths greater than 20 m and weigh more than 100,000 kg. [44] This gigantism is directly related to their feeding mechanism – mysticete size has been found to be dependent on the amount of baleen a mysticete can use ...
Baleen whales have two flippers on the front, near the head. Like all mammals, baleen whales breathe air and must surface periodically to do so. Their nostrils, or blowholes, are situated at the top of the cranium. Baleen whales have two blowholes, as opposed to toothed whales which have one.
Whales do, however, lack short wavelength sensitive visual pigments in their cone cells indicating a more limited capacity for colour vision than most mammals. [51] Most whales have slightly flattened eyeballs, enlarged pupils (which shrink as they surface to prevent damage), slightly flattened corneas and a tapetum lucidum; these adaptations ...
A diagnostic feature often used by field scientists to distinguish Rice's whales from whales other than the Bryde's whale is the three prominent ridges that line the top of its head. The species can be distinguished from the Bryde's whale by the shape of the nasal bones , which have wider gaps due to a unique wrapping by the frontal bones , its ...
Flippers are one of the principal control surfaces of cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) due to their position in front of the center of mass, and their mobility which provides three degrees of freedom. [4] The tubercles on the flippers of humpback whales improve the hydrodynamics of the flipper at their size. Breaking up channels of ...
Pitman, who has studied killer whales in Antarctica for over 10 years, said there's a similar divide between mammal- and fish-eating killer whales in those waters.
A researcher fires a biopsy dart at an orca.The dart will remove a small piece of the whale's skin and bounce harmlessly off the animal. Cetology (from Greek κῆτος, kētos, "whale"; and -λογία, -logia) or whalelore (also known as whaleology) is the branch of marine mammal science that studies the approximately eighty species of whales, dolphins, and porpoises in the scientific ...