Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 October 1878 — Whalebone. [ARTICLE]

Whalebone.

Few persons know what the whalebone of commerce represents in the living animal. A writer thus describes it: Whalebone, in fact, represents an enormous development of the gum of the whale, and exists in the living animal in the form of two rows of plates, which, like a great double fringe, hang or depend from its palate. From 150 to 200 of these plates exist in the mouth of a whale, and the largest plates may measure from eight to ten or twelve feet in length. The inner edges of these whalebone plates exhibit a fringed or frayed-out appearance, and the whole apparatus is adapted to serve as a kind of gigantic sieve or strainer. Thus, when the whale fills the mouth with water, large numbers of minute animals, allied to the jelly-fishes and the like, are ingulfed and drawn into the capacious mouth cavity. The water is allowed to escape by the sides of the mouth, but its solid animal contents are strained off and entangled by the whalebone fringes, and, when a sufficient quantity of food has been captured in this way, the morsel is duly swallowed. Thus it is somewhat curious to reflect that the largest animals are supported by some of the smallest beings.