Sentences with word «spermaceti»

THE RICHES OF THE SPERM WHALE: Commercial whalers sought the sperm whale for its fine oil, dark meat, unique spermaceti and mysterious ambergris.

Much of a sperm whale's head is occupied by the spermaceti organ, a huge fibrous cask containing a milky, waxy material that was highly prized as a lubricant and lamp oil, and which to Nantucket whalers looked like nothing more than gallons and gallons of semen — hence the name.

With an index finger he traced the path of the sound from the back of the spermaceti organ, down through the chunks of fat, and out through the front of the animal's nose.

The spermaceti organ, according to this school of thought, helps amplify and focus the whale's sonic emissions, which it uses to stun fast - swimming squid and fish long enough to gobble them up.

From this pocket, the left nasal passage loops around the left side of the spermaceti organ and goes directly to the lungs.

To modern biologists, a structure as big and as odd as the spermaceti organ cries out for an evolutionary explanation, and marine mammalogists have argued for years over its function.

Beneath this convoluted arrangement lie lens - shaped chunks of fat, which whalers called junk because they are more difficult to retrieve than the contents of the spermaceti organ.

In a female whale, or a young male, the spermaceti accounts for less than a quarter of the animal's total length.

«Especially when the structure for making them, this spermaceti organ, is full of wax that is actually toxic to the animal and has to be sequestered in the cask and is so big it makes it pretty hard for the animal to maneuver.

The spermaceti organ is also thought to act as an acoustical lens to focus infrasonic sound waves into a beam that bounces off objects, enabling the whale to «see» them in the dark.

The blowhole, which lies at the front of the head slightly to the left of center, connects to a widened pocket at the front of the spermaceti organ.

«I've never been able to figure out how they rationalized females having spermaceti too,» Cranford says.

The right nasal passage continues from the museau to create a layer of air that stretches underneath the spermaceti organ and joins with a sac that covers the face of the skull before regaining its tubular shape and heading for the lungs.

Researchers still debate the function, but spermaceti may help protect the whale's brain during its extremely deep dives.

The large spermaceti organ (in yellow, near the top), both magnifies and focuses the sounds, which bounce off the back of the skull (in white), then down and out the front of the head.

Anyway, the click travels backward from the lips through the spermaceti, which has the same sound - conduction properties as water.