Right Whale Lower Lip and Hare-Lip
The lower lip hangs down in an enormous pout measuring approximately twenty feet long and five feet deep—a sulk that yields some 500 gallons of oil. The whale is notably hare-lipped, with a fissure about a foot across, potentially caused when the mother sailed past the Peruvian coast during an earthquake that made the beach gape open.
Right Whale Mouth Interior and Blinds
Inside the mouth, the roof rises about twelve feet high to a sharp angle resembling a ridge-pole. The walls present those wondrous, half-vertical, scimetar-shaped slats of whalebone—about three hundred on each side—forming Venetian blinds that depend from the crown bone. These fringed bones serve as the whale’s filtering mechanism for straining water and retaining small fish during feeding.
Whalebone Blind Function and Age Estimation
The edges of the baleen bones are fringed with hairy fibers through which the Right Whale strains seawater, catching small fish in the intricate fibers when it feeds. Natural marks, curves, hollows, and ridges appear in the central blinds, and some whalemen calculate the whale’s age from these patterns, comparing the method to determining an oak’s age by its rings—though this criterion’s certainty remains undemonstrated yet analogically probable.
Historical Descriptions of Right Whale Mouth Blinds
Voyagers have described these baleen structures in remarkably varied terms. One writer in Purchas called them “whiskers,” another named them “hogs’ bristles,” while a third in Hackluyt described them as “fins” growing on each side of the upper chop, arching over the tongue. The text notes the whale does possess actual whiskers—a moustache of scattered white hairs on the outer lower jaw that gives the creature a somewhat brigandish expression.
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