Stephen Jeffries, age 8, of Denver, Colorado for his question:
Why does a whale spout water ?
The spout of the whale is a giant cousin of that filmy white breath which you puff out on a frosty morning. Your breath gathered water vapor from you moist insides and the cool air condensed it into a little cloud. Now puff up your imagination and think of a whale longer than ten elephants standing on top of each other. He took a great breath into his steamy insides and held it underwater for from 15 minutes to an hour. What a huge damp breath he would blow when he comes up for air and so he does,
"Thar she blows!" shout the happy whalers when these monsters of the deep spout their steamy fountains above the surface of the sea. For not only have they spotted their target, but the spouting bet often tells them what kind of a whale it is.
A sloping spray, bushy like a plumey tail, may belong to the vicious killer whale. A Y shaped fountain most likely belongs to the baleen right whale. I spray of 10 to 12 feet straight up into the air might be the finback whale. And a tall spout of 20 feet could only belong to the baleen blue whale largest creature ever to inhabit our earth.
Early whalers were sure that these tell tale spouts were made of water. The whale, they said, must swallow a lot of water and from time to time he spouts it out through a hole in the top of his head. This explanation went out of fashion when it was known that the spouts were not actually made of water:
The whale, of course, is not a fish and cannot breathe under watery It is a warm blooded, air breathing mammal. Its huge body is kept comfortably warm in the icy depths by massive layers of fat blubber. Its breathing is done in two great lungs and the air is taken in and blown out through nostrils, or blow holes, in the top of its head,
When at last he surfaces' the whale lets out a huge breath carrying waste carbon dioxide and water vapor which blows up as a plumey white fountain. after holding his breath so long, the whale takes a few short puffs just as you would to rid his system of all the carbon dioxide: Then he takes a deep breaths loads up with a fresh supply of oxygen and gets ready to swim under water for another 20 minutes or so.