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04/21/2004

Why the Big Head?

While in Florida, I saw a news item noting the disappearance of a
species of whale from the Gulf of Mexico. This week there was
an AP article dated April 15 on the AOL News Web site stating
that a University of Florida student had photographed two right
whales in the Gulf off the Florida Panhandle. This is reportedly
the first sighting of a right whale in the Gulf in over 30 years.
With a total of only some 300 right whales in existence, this
could be a hopeful sign, especially since the two whales were
probably a mother and her calf, judging from their sizes.

This reminded me of another baby whale sighted on the opposite
side of the country south of San Francisco a few years ago.
Unfortunately, the baby whale washed up on a beach and
expired. This baby and I had something in common. We both
had to undergo CT scans. My CT scan this week was a follow-
up to my kidney surgery last September. For those who haven’t
had the experience, a CT scan of the abdominal region requires
drinking about a quart of a barium sulfate suspension to coat the
intestinal walls to help delineate them in the X-ray picture. The
yucky part of the procedure for me is getting hooked up to an IV
to introduce dye into the bloodstream. It took five tries to find a
suitable vein for my first CT scan last year. This week the
technologist only needed two shots at it, one in each arm.

The baby whale had it better in that regard – it was dead for its
scan. You’re right, better to suffer the IVs. The baby was a
sperm whale, one characteristic of which ties in with the subject
of last week’s column. If you missed it, we talked about sounds,
particularly the “singing” of yeast cells, which reportedly sing in
the soprano range. The “song” of the yeast cell must be one of
the softest sounds in nature. The sperm whale, on the other hand,
emits nature’s most powerful sound, according to an article by
Shannon Brownlee in the December 2003 issue of Discover
magazine titled “Blast from the Vast”.

If a sperm whale’s click, which lasts typically only 1/10,000th of
a second, were heard in open air it would be louder than a jumbo
jet taking off! Comparing it to the sound of another large animal,
the sperm’s click would measure twice the decibel level of an
elephant’s trumpeting. In water, the whale’s click is amplified
another 60 times and is enough to stun large numbers of fish and
squid. Even though the click lasts for a fraction of a second, the
click contains varying patterns of frequencies and amplitudes,
apparently under the control of the whale. The clicks emerge
from the whale’s head in an intense, focused beam.

Ted Cranford, an adjunct professor at San Diego State
University, wants to know how the sperm controls and generates
the click. He also wonders about the purpose of the click and
why the whale evolved its huge head, which may be fully a third
of its body. A large male sperm whale might have a 25-foot long
head, much of it occupied by what’s known as the spermaceti
organ. This organ is a huge container of a milky, waxy material
that was the object of the old whalers’ attention because of its
use as a lubricant and as an oil to light the lamps.

As you might imagine, it’s not an easy task to figure out the
detailed structure of a whale’s head. First, you have to find a
head! Chances are the head that you find will not be in the best
of shape and, even if it is, slicing up a head isn’t the easiest of
jobs. A CT scan of a sperm’s head seemed a much better way to
elucidate its internal structure. Fortunately, Cranford is a
gregarious type who communicated his dream of CT scanning a
whale’s head to friends and colleagues.

Cranford was attending a conference in England when a couple
of his friends heard that our baby sperm had beached itself.
These friends were not only marine-mammal veterinarians but
were also quite resourceful individuals. They drove 30 miles or
so up the coast from Santa Cruz, borrowed a front-end loader
from a lumber company and managed to cut through all the
blubber and bone to sever the baby’s 600-pound head. Even a
baby whale is big! After using the loader to put the head in the
pickup, they drove the head back to Santa Cruz, where they
stored it in a walk-in freezer.

When Cranford returned from England, his problem was to find
funding to CT scan the head. (You’ll note that I said he was an
adjunct professor. As an adjunct professor myself, I know that
typically the title is not accompanied by any monetary
remuneration.) Cranford was refused by various agencies on the
basis that scanning a whale’s head couldn’t be done. But
Cranford was not a novice in this area, having earlier CT scanned
a dolphin’s head. Of course, a dolphin’s head could have fit in
the machine used to scan my abdomen.

Where to find a scanner big enough to handle the baby sperm’s
head? The U. S. Navy China Lake facility was the answer. They
had a large CT scanner designed to detect flaws in solid-fuel
rocket motors and China Lake was the site of the origin of the
Navy’s marine-mammal program. This program is notable for
its research on dolphins and their use by the Navy for such tasks
as underwater mine detection.

Having located his scanner and support, Cranford had to figure
out how to keep baby’s frozen head cold and immobile inside the
scanner for the four 8-hour days the scanner would be working to
complete the head scan. (By comparison, my scan took about
half an hour.) Cranford came up with the approach of putting the
frozen head inside a long cardboard tube of the type used to cast
concrete pillars for highway overpasses. The tube was filled
with polyurethane foam, which did not interfere with the X-rays
and also served to insulate the head. Once the foam had
hardened it was off for an overnight drive to China Lake, only to
find a storm had killed the computers that drive the CT scanner!
Fortunately, the Navy had a freezer to accommodate the head.

The frozen head finally was scanned and Cranford got his
detailed structure of the whale’s sound generating system. You
can see some of the results of the scan on Cranford’s Web site
spermwhale.org, which also sells whale related items (remember,
he’s probably not funded by his university). Without going into
detail, let’s consider what happens to the air taken in when the
whale surfaces. The air enters through the blowhole into a kind
of pocket and then has a choice of two routes. The air can take
the left passage that leads to the lungs and presumably from there
gets routed much as in our own bodies.

The rest of the air takes the right passage, passing through a pair
of tightly compressed “lips”. Dolphins have similar “lips” and
studies have shown that the dolphin’s “lips” are involved in
generating the various sounds it produces. Cranford speculates
that the whale’s lips smack together as the air flows through
them to produce the clicks. His Web site shows pictures of these
lips being pried open and, even in a dead whale, it takes a lot of
effort to pull them apart. Once the air passes through the lips,
which Cranford calls “phonic lips”, it passes through the
spermaceti, bounces off an air sac through fatty stuff, thought to
act as lenses and emerges through the front of the nose.

In the process, the sound is focused into a beam less than about a
foot in diameter. As mentioned, the intense beam can stun
marine creatures that could serve as tasty treats for the whale.
But Cranford isn’t satisfied that the only reason for the loud,
intense sound is to catch prey. One possibility is that the clicks
could be used for echolocation, the radar-like principle that bats
use to locate prey and obstacles. However, the davidson.edu
Web site describes an experiment on a humpback whale that was
temporarily captured and, hopefully, temporarily blinded, that
could not find its way. This was interpreted as showing at least
the humpback doesn’t use its clicks as a navigational tool.

These days, doesn’t it always seem to come down to sex? In
trying to explain why the whale’s head and that spermaceti organ
have evolved to be so huge, Cranford’s postulate is that the
whale’s clicks are like the peacock’s tail, serving to attract the
opposite sex. Cranford cites the presence of “miniclicks” that
accompany the big clicks that we’ve been discussing. It seems
that some of the air bounces back and forth in the spermaceti
before emerging and that these “boing, boing, boings” emerge as
miniclicks following the big one. The time between the
miniclicks depends on the length of the spermaceti organ.

Presumably, the perceptive female sperm whale will favor the
male sperm that has the longest separation between clicks, hence
the longest spermaceti. If I were to advise those choosy females
I would suggest that they not be too picky. The way things are
going, it would be wise to get cracking and produce babies
ASAP in order to keep the species alive in the face of all the bad
stuff we humans do to their environment.

Allen F. Bortrum



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-04/21/2004-      
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Dr. Bortrum

04/21/2004

Why the Big Head?

While in Florida, I saw a news item noting the disappearance of a
species of whale from the Gulf of Mexico. This week there was
an AP article dated April 15 on the AOL News Web site stating
that a University of Florida student had photographed two right
whales in the Gulf off the Florida Panhandle. This is reportedly
the first sighting of a right whale in the Gulf in over 30 years.
With a total of only some 300 right whales in existence, this
could be a hopeful sign, especially since the two whales were
probably a mother and her calf, judging from their sizes.

This reminded me of another baby whale sighted on the opposite
side of the country south of San Francisco a few years ago.
Unfortunately, the baby whale washed up on a beach and
expired. This baby and I had something in common. We both
had to undergo CT scans. My CT scan this week was a follow-
up to my kidney surgery last September. For those who haven’t
had the experience, a CT scan of the abdominal region requires
drinking about a quart of a barium sulfate suspension to coat the
intestinal walls to help delineate them in the X-ray picture. The
yucky part of the procedure for me is getting hooked up to an IV
to introduce dye into the bloodstream. It took five tries to find a
suitable vein for my first CT scan last year. This week the
technologist only needed two shots at it, one in each arm.

The baby whale had it better in that regard – it was dead for its
scan. You’re right, better to suffer the IVs. The baby was a
sperm whale, one characteristic of which ties in with the subject
of last week’s column. If you missed it, we talked about sounds,
particularly the “singing” of yeast cells, which reportedly sing in
the soprano range. The “song” of the yeast cell must be one of
the softest sounds in nature. The sperm whale, on the other hand,
emits nature’s most powerful sound, according to an article by
Shannon Brownlee in the December 2003 issue of Discover
magazine titled “Blast from the Vast”.

If a sperm whale’s click, which lasts typically only 1/10,000th of
a second, were heard in open air it would be louder than a jumbo
jet taking off! Comparing it to the sound of another large animal,
the sperm’s click would measure twice the decibel level of an
elephant’s trumpeting. In water, the whale’s click is amplified
another 60 times and is enough to stun large numbers of fish and
squid. Even though the click lasts for a fraction of a second, the
click contains varying patterns of frequencies and amplitudes,
apparently under the control of the whale. The clicks emerge
from the whale’s head in an intense, focused beam.

Ted Cranford, an adjunct professor at San Diego State
University, wants to know how the sperm controls and generates
the click. He also wonders about the purpose of the click and
why the whale evolved its huge head, which may be fully a third
of its body. A large male sperm whale might have a 25-foot long
head, much of it occupied by what’s known as the spermaceti
organ. This organ is a huge container of a milky, waxy material
that was the object of the old whalers’ attention because of its
use as a lubricant and as an oil to light the lamps.

As you might imagine, it’s not an easy task to figure out the
detailed structure of a whale’s head. First, you have to find a
head! Chances are the head that you find will not be in the best
of shape and, even if it is, slicing up a head isn’t the easiest of
jobs. A CT scan of a sperm’s head seemed a much better way to
elucidate its internal structure. Fortunately, Cranford is a
gregarious type who communicated his dream of CT scanning a
whale’s head to friends and colleagues.

Cranford was attending a conference in England when a couple
of his friends heard that our baby sperm had beached itself.
These friends were not only marine-mammal veterinarians but
were also quite resourceful individuals. They drove 30 miles or
so up the coast from Santa Cruz, borrowed a front-end loader
from a lumber company and managed to cut through all the
blubber and bone to sever the baby’s 600-pound head. Even a
baby whale is big! After using the loader to put the head in the
pickup, they drove the head back to Santa Cruz, where they
stored it in a walk-in freezer.

When Cranford returned from England, his problem was to find
funding to CT scan the head. (You’ll note that I said he was an
adjunct professor. As an adjunct professor myself, I know that
typically the title is not accompanied by any monetary
remuneration.) Cranford was refused by various agencies on the
basis that scanning a whale’s head couldn’t be done. But
Cranford was not a novice in this area, having earlier CT scanned
a dolphin’s head. Of course, a dolphin’s head could have fit in
the machine used to scan my abdomen.

Where to find a scanner big enough to handle the baby sperm’s
head? The U. S. Navy China Lake facility was the answer. They
had a large CT scanner designed to detect flaws in solid-fuel
rocket motors and China Lake was the site of the origin of the
Navy’s marine-mammal program. This program is notable for
its research on dolphins and their use by the Navy for such tasks
as underwater mine detection.

Having located his scanner and support, Cranford had to figure
out how to keep baby’s frozen head cold and immobile inside the
scanner for the four 8-hour days the scanner would be working to
complete the head scan. (By comparison, my scan took about
half an hour.) Cranford came up with the approach of putting the
frozen head inside a long cardboard tube of the type used to cast
concrete pillars for highway overpasses. The tube was filled
with polyurethane foam, which did not interfere with the X-rays
and also served to insulate the head. Once the foam had
hardened it was off for an overnight drive to China Lake, only to
find a storm had killed the computers that drive the CT scanner!
Fortunately, the Navy had a freezer to accommodate the head.

The frozen head finally was scanned and Cranford got his
detailed structure of the whale’s sound generating system. You
can see some of the results of the scan on Cranford’s Web site
spermwhale.org, which also sells whale related items (remember,
he’s probably not funded by his university). Without going into
detail, let’s consider what happens to the air taken in when the
whale surfaces. The air enters through the blowhole into a kind
of pocket and then has a choice of two routes. The air can take
the left passage that leads to the lungs and presumably from there
gets routed much as in our own bodies.

The rest of the air takes the right passage, passing through a pair
of tightly compressed “lips”. Dolphins have similar “lips” and
studies have shown that the dolphin’s “lips” are involved in
generating the various sounds it produces. Cranford speculates
that the whale’s lips smack together as the air flows through
them to produce the clicks. His Web site shows pictures of these
lips being pried open and, even in a dead whale, it takes a lot of
effort to pull them apart. Once the air passes through the lips,
which Cranford calls “phonic lips”, it passes through the
spermaceti, bounces off an air sac through fatty stuff, thought to
act as lenses and emerges through the front of the nose.

In the process, the sound is focused into a beam less than about a
foot in diameter. As mentioned, the intense beam can stun
marine creatures that could serve as tasty treats for the whale.
But Cranford isn’t satisfied that the only reason for the loud,
intense sound is to catch prey. One possibility is that the clicks
could be used for echolocation, the radar-like principle that bats
use to locate prey and obstacles. However, the davidson.edu
Web site describes an experiment on a humpback whale that was
temporarily captured and, hopefully, temporarily blinded, that
could not find its way. This was interpreted as showing at least
the humpback doesn’t use its clicks as a navigational tool.

These days, doesn’t it always seem to come down to sex? In
trying to explain why the whale’s head and that spermaceti organ
have evolved to be so huge, Cranford’s postulate is that the
whale’s clicks are like the peacock’s tail, serving to attract the
opposite sex. Cranford cites the presence of “miniclicks” that
accompany the big clicks that we’ve been discussing. It seems
that some of the air bounces back and forth in the spermaceti
before emerging and that these “boing, boing, boings” emerge as
miniclicks following the big one. The time between the
miniclicks depends on the length of the spermaceti organ.

Presumably, the perceptive female sperm whale will favor the
male sperm that has the longest separation between clicks, hence
the longest spermaceti. If I were to advise those choosy females
I would suggest that they not be too picky. The way things are
going, it would be wise to get cracking and produce babies
ASAP in order to keep the species alive in the face of all the bad
stuff we humans do to their environment.

Allen F. Bortrum