Werth thinks the Corpus Cavernosum Maxillaris keeps them from crossing that line. So they swim very close to the thermoregulatory line. The whales can expand the vessels to release more heat when needed and constrict them to avoid losing too much.īowheads don’t have any dorsal fin at all, and the fins on their sides are small. The flukes of their tails and their fins can also dump heat. A number of whale species, for example, have an intricate system of blood vessels that deliver hot blood from the core of their body into the dorsal fin on their back, where the heat can escape through the skin. Many marine mammals have adaptations to reduce this danger. Too much heat can damage a mammal’s organs, with the brain being especially sensitive to even the slightest fluctuations of temperature. Thanks to their anatomy, the whales are so well protected against the cold that this extra heat has nowhere to go. As warm-blooded animals, bowhead whales generate heat, and when they’re foraging for food or migrating across an ocean, their muscles generate even more heat. Unfortunately, solutions to biological problems have a way of causing problems of their own. As a result, they can store more heat in their body and lose less of it through their skin than a thinner whale. The shape of their bodies also helps keep them warm Werth calls them “chubby, rotund zeppelins.” Their round shape gives them a low ratio of surface area to body volume. Bowheads are blubber champions, growing layers that can get as thick as 40 centimeters. ![]() Indeed, bowheads, like other marine mammals, have a very good adaptation for that job: namely, blubber. ![]() You’d think that bowheads would need special adaptations to keep their warmth in, not to get rid of it. And bowhead whales lead extraordinarily frigid lives, spending much of the year in the Arctic Ocean. Water is very good at pulling heat out of a body, even at lukewarm temperatures. Staying cool may seem like the last thing a bowhead whale needs to worry about. It has two jobs, the first of which is to keep the whale’s brain cool. They found that they made close contact with a web of blood vessels at the base of the brain.īased on these findings and others, Werth and his colleagues think they know what the organ–which they dubbed the Corpus Cavernosum Maxillaris–is for. Werth and his colleagues traced the blood vessels out of the organ and into the interior of the whale head. ![]() Its anatomy strongly suggests that the whales can engorge it–hence the bloody mess it made when the whales were cut apart. The organ in the bowhead whale mouth, Werth and his colleagues found, has the same distinctively spongy tissue, along with copious vessels supplying it with blood. Unlike a bone, which is always hard, the penis can become soft again when its vessels pump out all the blood. Thus the penis becomes both enlarged and hardened. As the penis swells, collagen fibers wrapped around the spongy tissue stretch and then tighten. When blood pours into the penis, the tissue stores it in a multitude of cavities, stretching out to hold the increased volume. Penises–in humans, whales, and other mammals–are made of a distinctively sponge-like tissue. You see, the organ in the whale’s mouth turned out to be, biomechanically speaking, a twelve-foot-long penis. They brought one of the organs back to their lab, along with sections they chopped out of other organs, to examine under a microscope.Īnd this is where the story gets a little NSWF. They dissected some of the organs out of freshly killed whales, photographing them as they cut the tissue free. So Werth, Ford, and Craig George the Department of Wildlife Management at the North Slope Borough in Alaska decided to take a close look at the bowhead whales. One of Werth’s colleagues, Thomas Ford of Ocean Alliance, had noticed something similar in right whales twenty years ago.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |