cetacean
- Key People:
- Roy Chapman Andrews
- Related Topics:
- dolphin
- whale
- baleen whale
- toothed whale
- Archaeoceti
cetacean, (order Cetacea), any member of an entirely aquatic group of mammals commonly known as whales, dolphins, and porpoises. The ancient Greeks recognized that cetaceans breathe air, give birth to live young, produce milk, and have hair—all features of mammals. Because of their body form, however, cetaceans were commonly grouped with the fishes. Cetaceans are entirely carnivorous, although members of the order Sirenia (manatees, dugongs, and Steller’s sea cow) were once referred to as the “herbivorous Cetacea.” In the past cetaceans were important resources (see whaling), but by the end of the 20th century their economic importance was almost solely due to whale watching, a tourist activity and major source of income for certain coastal regions of many countries.
Form and function
General features
Body surface
The hair covering that is common to mammals is drastically reduced in cetaceans, likely because hair is a poor insulator when wet and increases drag during swimming. Hairs on cetaceans are restricted to the head, with isolated follicles occurring on the lower jaw and the snout. These are thought to be remnants of sensory whiskers (vibrissae). External pigmentation is important to many animals as a basis for individual recognition and species recognition. Hair defines the colour pattern of most mammals, but, because cetaceans have very little hair, the outer layer of skin (epidermis) produces their markings, most commonly in shades of black and white. The appearance of some cetaceans is affected by various organisms living on or in the skin. Examples include yellow algae that colour the lower body surface of blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus) and the variety of whitish organisms living on bodies of gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus) and right whales (family Balaenidae).
Locomotor adaptations
The most noticeable adaptation of cetaceans to life in the water is their locomotive system. Because cetaceans descended from mammals that moved their limbs in a vertical plane rather than in a horizontal plane, they use vertical strokes when they swim, instead of horizontal strokes like a crocodile or fish. Cetaceans evolved from four-legged (quadruped) terrestrial animals, for which limbs played a primary role in movements, into virtually limbless aquatic creatures living in an environment where the back muscles are more important. Forelimbs are still present but are reduced to finlike flippers having shortened arm bones and no individual fingers. The hind limbs are lost entirely; only vestigial elements sometimes remain internally. Pelvic remnants occur in all cetacea but the dwarf and pygmy sperm whales. Flippers help to steer, while the back muscles, which are very large, drive the tail to propel the animal. Cetaceans have developed horizontal flukes that increase the propulsion area driven by the back muscles. Like fish, almost all cetaceans possess a dorsal fin that serves as a keel. The dorsal fin and flukes are composed of connective tissue, not bone. Other connective tissue, such as external ears, has been lost, and the male genitalia have moved internally.
Respiration
Normally, cetaceans breathe while moving through the water and spend only a short time at the surface, where they exhale in an explosive ventilation called a blow. The blow is expelled forcibly and can be compared to a cough. Cetaceans use up to 80 percent of their lung volume in a single breath, in contrast to humans, who use only 20 percent. The blow is visible because of water condensation and mucous particles; blows of blue whales are frequently more than 6 metres (20 feet) high. When a terrestrial mammal loses consciousness, it breathes reflexively, but breathing is not a reflex in cetaceans. Thus, when a cetacean loses consciousness, it does not breathe and quickly dies. For this reason, veterinarians had to perfect respirators before dolphins could be successfully anesthetized.
Circulation and thermoregulation
Cetaceans, like all mammals, have a four-chambered heart with paired ventricles and auricles. The pattern of circulation is similar to that of other mammals, with the exception of a series of well-developed reservoirs for oxygenated blood called the rete mirabile, for "marvelous network." These provide bypasses that enable cetaceans to isolate skeletal muscle circulation during diving while using the oxygen stored in the remaining blood to maintain the heart and brain—the two organs that depend on a constant supply of oxygen to survive.
Water conducts heat much more rapidly than air and is colder than the mammalian body temperature of about 37 °C (98.6 °F). Cetacean evolution has countered this problem in three ways: reducing external appendages that lose heat, developing an insulating layer of blubber, and developing countercurrent circulation to minimize heat loss. The reduction of various appendages as mentioned above also facilitates locomotion in water.
In whales, a layer of the skin (dermis) has evolved into a blanket of blubber, which is extremely rich in fats and oils and therefore conducts heat poorly. This blanket covers the entire body and is up to 30 cm (12 inches) thick in large whales, making up a significant portion of the animal’s weight. The oil yield of blubber from a blue whale, for example, was up to 50 tons.
The most important mechanism in cetacean thermoregulation is the development of countercurrent blood exchange, an adaptation that allows the animal to either conserve or dissipate heat as needed. Blood that drains from the surface of the skin has been cooled by close contact with the external environment, and it can return to the cetacean’s heart via two different routes. If it returns by the peripheral route, the blood courses back to the heart through superficial veins, where it continues to lose heat and arrives at the heart cool. This dumps the animal’s excess heat to the environment. Such heat shedding is particularly important to large whales because of their enormous surface area-to-volume ratio. If, however, the body temperature of the whale is already cool, the oxygen-depleted venous blood can instead return to the heart through vessels that are wrapped around arteries carrying warm blood to the periphery of the animal. Along this route the venous blood is warmed by the arterial blood and arrives at the heart warm. The arterial blood, having transferred its heat into the venous blood rather than the environment, arrives precooled at the surface of the skin.
Feeding adaptations
Before cetaceans evolved aquatic adaptations, they had a fully differentiated set of teeth (heterodont dentition), including incisors, canines, premolars, and molars. As the animals became more adapted to aquatic locomotion and lost the ability to manipulate food with their forelimbs, they started grabbing their food and swallowing it whole. In toothed whales (suborder Odontoceti), heterodont dentition declined and was replaced with a homodont dentition in which every tooth is a simple cone. The number of teeth varies among toothed whales, from two in the beaked whales (family Ziphiidae [Hyperoodontidae in some classifications]) to 242 in the La Plata river dolphin (Pontoporia blainvillei), to allow efficient capture of prey. Baleen whales (suborder Mysticeti), on the other hand, have lost all teeth in both jaws and instead have two rows of baleen plates in their upper jaws only. This apparatus enables baleen whales to consume vast quantities of small prey in a single mouthful.
In general, whales have relatively large mouths. The mouth of one adult bowhead, or Greenland right whale (Balaena mysticetus), measures five metres long and three metres wide and is the biggest oral cavity on record. The stomach in cetaceans is composed of four compartments: forestomach, main stomach, connecting chambers, and pyloric stomach. The forestomach is actually a dilation of the esophagus and is lined with simple epithelium (layers of flattened cells). It acts merely as a holding chamber and therefore is not a true stomach. The main stomach, lined with active gastric epithelium, is the first true digestive compartment, and it is followed by the small connecting chambers and the pyloric stomach. From there, food enters the small intestine through the pyloric sphincter and the duodenal ampulla. Most cetaceans do not have a cecum or appendix, and in most there is no anatomic difference between the small and the large intestine.
The senses
The sensory system of any animal can be divided into somesthetic senses—those relating to the whole body—and special senses associated with particular organs such as the eyes and ears. Somesthetic senses are broken down into exteroceptive (initiated by stimuli outside the body), proprioceptive (initiated within the body, determining the orientation of body parts relative to one another and the orientation of the body in space), and visceral (usually from internal organs and usually painful). Cetaceans, as far as is known, are subject to the familiar exteroceptive sensations. For example, captive and stranded animals respond to stimuli of touch, pain, and heat. Because precise assessment of the other somesthetic modalities (proprioceptive and visceral) is difficult, scientists have simply assumed their presence.
The special senses respond to stimuli registered by specialized organs or tissues. One way to quantify the presence of a special sense in an animal is to consider the organs involved.
Smell
The sense of smell can be defined as those sensations carried from nose to brain by the olfactory nerve. Toothed whales have lost the olfactory nerve, so by definition they are incapable of smelling. On the other hand, they do use "quasi-olfaction" (see below). Baleen whales have retained this nerve and have a reduced area for olfaction in the nasal passage, but this sense is active only while the animal is breathing at the surface.
Taste
Captive dolphins (family Delphinidae) commonly exercise food taste discrimination that is comparable to the human ability, in spite of the fact that the presence of taste buds in cetaceans has not been demonstrated. Regardless, dolphins have been shown to be sensitive to the standard four qualities of taste: sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. It has been established that the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) has a highly effective sense, called quasi-olfaction, operating through pits in the back of the tongue. This sense permits dolphins to experience what would be classified as smell, but quasi-olfaction does not involve the nasal passages.
Sight
Cetaceans have well-developed eyes and good vision. The popular notion that whales have reduced vision is probably based on the relative size of their eyes, but this assumption is functionally incorrect. Vision in both the water and the air has been experimentally evaluated in captive dolphins and found to be excellent. They have binocular vision over at least part of the visual field but are largely insensitive to colour. In one genus of river dolphin (Platanista of the muddy Ganges and Indus rivers), the eyes are reduced to organs that can detect only the difference between light and dark. The external opening for the eye is a slit only 2–3 cm (about an inch) long.
Hearing
Whales and dolphins have long been known to possess an acute sense of hearing. When approaching whales, whalers muffled their oars to prevent the animals from hearing them. Research done with captive animals in the 1950s quantitatively demonstrated that dolphins both produce and are sensitive to sounds into the ultrasonic range. Dolphins and porpoises were found to have the ability to derive information about their environment by listening to echoes of sounds that they have produced (echolocation). The amount of information obtained by an echolocating dolphin is similar to that obtained with the eyes of a sighted human.
The sound sensitivity of dolphins falls off near the bottom of the human acoustic spectrum (40–50 hertz), but this is the beginning of the range used by the large baleen whales. Fin whales (Balaenoptera physalus) and blue whales have been recorded producing subsonic sounds around 10 hertz and are capable of producing extremely loud noises at those frequencies. The strength of these vocalizations enabled one blue whale to be followed by fixed hydrophone arrays on the ocean bottom for 43 days over a course of 2,700 km (1,700 miles).
Magnetic sensitivity
Much interest has been shown in various animals’ ability to sense the Earth’s magnetic field. It has been demonstrated that birds and fish use magnetoreception in migration, and theories to explain why cetaceans beach themselves in mass strandings (see below) have included magnetic detection. Although magnetite has been found in some skulls of the common dolphin (Delphinus delphis), it has not been found in other specimens of the same species, and no conclusive data indicate its biological use.