When workers with a whale strandings agency in Scotland performed a necropsy on a recently beached sperm whale, they found a gruesome surprise: The animal had died with around lbs. Fishing nets, rope bundles, tubes and an assortment of plastic garbage formed a compact mass — a so-called litter ball — inside the ton whale, "and some of it it looked like it had been there for some time," according to the post. Related: Whale Photos: Giants of the Deep. Because whales' skin and blubber insulate them so effectively, bacteria inside a whale corpse can multiply quickly even when air temperatures are low. As the bacteria help to decompose the remains, they produce gases that then build up pressure inside the body, and the sperm whale on the Scottish beach was no exception — it "sort of exploded" upon investigation, according to the Facebook post. SMASS researchers and volunteers collect and analyze data on stranded animals that wash up along the Scottish coast, which includes islands and spans nearly 12, miles 19, kilometers , according to the SMASS website.


Sperm whales snooze vertically in jaw-dropping images



Sperm Whale Stock Photos And Images - RF
The inspiration for the white whale of Moby Dick, sperm whales have the largest heads, biggest brains, and make the loudest sound of any animal on Earth. Region: Arctic. Destinations: Lofoten, Greenland, Svalbard, Iceland. Sperm whales usually eat a little over kg almost 2, pounds of food per day. To find their prey preferably giant squid , they dive somewhere between and 1, metres and 4, feet , though they can go as deep as 2 km 1. An average dive lasts about an hour.


Sperm whale
Wildscreen's Arkive project was launched in and grew to become the world's biggest encyclopaedia of life on Earth. Freely accessible to everyone, over half a million people every month, from over countries, used Arkive to learn and discover the wonders of the natural world. Since Wildscreen was unable to raise sufficient funds from trusts, foundations, corporates and individual donors to support the year-round costs of keeping Arkive online. Therefore, the charity had been using its reserves to keep the project online and was unable to fund any dedicated staff to maintain Arkive, let alone future-proof it, for over half a decade.




If you've ever heard someone mention a sperm whale — or you've been lucky enough to see one in person — one of the first things that probably crossed your mind was, "Why are they called sperm whales? According to James Stewart, education supervisor for the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California, they get that name because of the spermaceti organ in their heads. But what in the world is a spermaceti organ? The waxy liquid was considered a prized material during the era of Western and European whaling, and spermaceti, as well as blubber, was turned into numerous industrial products.