Everyone knows that the sperm whale, the largest animal in the sea, is an aquatic mammal. It breathes with the lungs, inhales on the surface of the water, and dives into the water, and can dive for 10~45 minutes. For a long time, people have explained the animal's ability to rise and fall, believing that it is mainly due to a layer of fat under its skin to reduce the specific gravity of its body.
Recently, scientists have specifically studied the physiological structure of sperm whales. They are deeply interested in sperm whales' big heads: sperm whales have a world record big head, and its head accounts for 1/3 of its total weight (60~100 tons).
This pet species generally feeds on zooplankton, molluscs and fish. It likes to eat horses the most, and this clever fish grows in the deep sea. In order to hunt horses, you must have superb diving skills, not only to scare away your prey, but also to hide yourself, which means that you must lie motionless on the bottom of the sea for half an hour. This lurking is balanced entirely by buoyancy, which requires sperm whales to have the same density of body density as the surrounding seawater.
Sperm whales have such huge heads in order to adjust the buoyancy of the body. Dissecting the giant, it was found that 9/10 of the volume was a kind of "cetic tissue", a "big bag" made of muscle and mesangium, filled with a type of whale in liquid form. It has been tested that the temperature of this "cetic tissue" through which blood vessels pass is often kept cool3 below its entire body temperature, which is useful for it.
When sperm whales dive into the deep sea, this special "heat exchanger" comes to work. Its passage deep into the right nasal cavity deep in the skull (which is completely different from the left nasal cavity) becomes a muscle cavity that connects to "cetaceous tissue." The seawater flowing into the "whale tissue" through the nasal cavity not only plays the role of "pressure water" in the submarine, but also reduces the temperature of the whale in it to its crystallization temperature - 31 ° C, so the volume of the whale shrinks, the density increases, and then the body density of the entire sperm whale increases.
The researchers pointed out that sperm whales' large heads actually act as swim bladders in other fish.