Julie Stippich, age 10, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for her question:
Does a whale have teeth?
Most whales have ordinary tusky teeth in their large jaws.
Those that do not, have tough, pliable strips of baleen hanging from the roofs of their mouths. These whales do not need teeth for biting, chewing or champing. Their remarkable baleen serves as a sieve to sift tiny particles of food from the water. It so happens that these substitute dentures belong to the world's biggest giants.
We call the remarkable whales cetaceans because they are classified in the Family Cetacea. They are grouped as toothed whales and baleen whales. The toothed group includes several giants, plus the smaller dolphins and porpoises. The baleen group includes the humpback and finner whales, the right whale and the blue whale. The baleens are all giants and the enormous blue whale is the largest animal that ever lived in our planet.
Scientists tell us that the remote cetacean ancestors lived on land and returned to live in the sea, long ages ago. There they remained warm blooded mammals and kept their air breathing lungs. But their bodies became streamlined to slide through the water and their limbs were remodeled for swimming. Perhaps the ancestors of the baleen types had ordinary tusky teeth that gradually changed to cope with the special food they sifted from the sea. The toothed whales have rather simple cone shaped teeth on both jaws or on only the lower jaw. They are fine for grabbing squid and shellfish, seals and fishes. The meaty food is gulped down without any chewing.
The baleen tooth substitute is called whalebone, though it is not bony material. It is somewhat like the strips of pliable plastic used to stiffen shirt collars. At one time, this so called whalebone was used to stiffen corsets and such and some people still use it to stiffen fans. It hangs in long strips like a double row of curtains from the roof of a baleen whale's enormous mouth. When his mouth is closed, the pliable strips bend back above his enormous tongue.
The whale's baleen and tongue work together to fill his tummy with a ton or so of plankton. This floating seafood salad of tiny plants and animals is his only food. As he swims along, he opens up to let in a flood of plankton rich sea water. As he closes his jaws, his tongue pushes the water through his baleen curtains and the strips sifts out the fragments of food. Actually, he uses his dentures as a soup strainer.
Most of the baleen whales are on the list of endangered species, likely to become extinct in the not too distant future. The gentle giants have few enemies in the sea but they have been senselessly slaughtered by man, mainly for their oily blubber. The great blue whale may be 100 feet long and weigh 100 tons. Yet whalers have destroyed almost all of them. Some ecologists think that there are not enough of them left to find mates and have children.