Marine mammal

“ They are the breathings of marine mammalia, mightiest of ocean’s citizens, and strangest of links between the inhabitants of land and sea. A little keen scrutiny, however, reveals the disappointing fact that those feathery phantoms mark the presence of that special species of whales who enjoy complete44 immunity from attack either from above or below. Their marvellous agility, no less than the exiguous covering of fat to which they have reduced the usually massive blubber borne by their congeners, gives abundant reason why they should be thus unmolested. ”

“ As a name for the class Linnæus adopted the term Mammalia, which he formed from the Latin mamma (i.e. teat) to designate those animals which suckle their young; hence the abbreviated form Mammal, which has been naturalized as an English word. “Beast,” as employed in the Bible, and “Quadruped” are not quite the same as mammal, for they do not include the marine forms, such as whales, dolphins, seals, walruses, or the flying bats, and they are habitually used in contradistinction to Man, though Man and all the forms mentioned are unquestionably mammals. ”

“ We must move away from the concept that seabirds are merely yo-yos of various sizes, shapes, and colors on strings of various lengths that venture forth to sea from the land, grab a quick lunch, and then return to the safety of terra firma. Seabirds are marine organisms and deserve at least as much research attention as that currently given marine mammals. ”

“ It is for these reasons that those animals best adapted of all for life in the water—the whales and sirenians—have lost the hind legs completely. In other tail-propelled air-breathers the hind legs have become progressively smaller and less powerful than the front ones. In all short-tailed water animals, however, where the legs, and especially the hind legs, have the important function of propulsion to subserve, they still retain the large size and firm connections with the body, examples of which will be seen in the seals, sea-otters, marine turtles, and plesiosaurs. ”

“ For were he to estimate the standing of the dolphin, not by its brain, but by its skeleton, he would have to assign to it a place, not only not in advance of its brethren the mammalia of the sea, but even in the rear of the reptiles of the sea, the marine tortoises, or turtles,—and scarce more than abreast of the osseous fishes. “Fishes,” says Professor Owen, in his “Lectures on the Vertebrate Animals,” “have the least proportion [163] of earthy matter in their bones; birds the largest. The mammalia, especially the active, predatory species, have more earth, or harder bones, than reptiles. ”

“ For few people ever really remember how very many big animals we still possess. We have the Indian and the African elephant, the hippopotamus, the various rhinoceroses, the walrus, the giraffe, the elk, the bison, the musk ox, the dromedary, and the camel. Big marine animals are generally in all ages bigger than their biggest terrestrial rivals, and most people lump all our big existing cetaceans under the common and ridiculous title of whales, which makes this vast and varied assortment of gigantic species seem all reducible to a common form. ”

“ We have been studying together these wonderful creatures, the manatee, the whale, and the seal. These are not the only mammals that live in the sea; the sea-lion, porpoise, dolphin, and others are also sea-mammals. In a book like this we cannot discuss all the animals of any large order, and now we turn from these huge citizens of the sea, to learn something about a small but equally curious flying mammal, a citizen of the air,—the bat. It is a little beast, universally disliked, even feared ”

“ When studying whales the most important fact to remember is that they are one-time land mammals which have taken up a life in the water and that their bodily activities, although somewhat modified, are nevertheless essentially the same as those of a horse, cow, or any other land mammal.
Since a whale breathes air, when it is below the surface the breath must be held, for if water should be taken into the lungs the animal would drown. ”

“ The whales, as compared with their dog-like ancestors, are modified to a more extreme degree and in more special ways than is the case in any other group of which we can trace the history over a similar period of development. This is connected with the complete change of conditions of life to which these mammals ("warm-blooded, air-breathing quadrupeds which suckle their young") have become adapted in passing from a terrestrial to a marine existence. ”

“ Whalemen always watch these birds while they are wheeling around high in the air in graceful and rapid circles, for they know that as soon as they sight a whale blowing they start for him, and from their elevated position they can, of course, discern one at a much greater distance than the men in the boat I doubt if it be altogether the marine animals brought to the surface by the whale that they are after, for if the whale remains above the surface any length of time they always settle on his back and hunt parasites. ”

“ Most species (roughly 53% in any community) include two or three prey categories in their diets—usually midwater schooling fish, squid, and crustaceans. These birds include the most numerous in the communities—the shearwaters and some alcids—which feed largely on three prey types, and also include some of the less abundant birds, the marine ducks, which feed mostly on two prey categories. ”

“ In this paper, we consider how marine birds and fish interact. Although some of what we present is only speculative, we identify certain areas that have received little or no scientific study, areas in which further research is needed for a better understanding of the role of commercial fish in the ecology and dynamics of marine birds in the eastern Bering Sea. ”

“ If in a series of evolving generations the line of modification proceeding from a terrestrial animal like a cat to semi-aquatic and marine types substantially like an otter and a seal should be carried further, it will inevitably lead to forms possessing characters such as those displayed by whales and the related porpoises, dolphins, and narwhals of the order cetacea. In their make-up all of these animals clearly possess the general characteristics of mammals, and they constitute collectively another limb which has sprung from the same stock as the carnivora, although at an earlier time. ”

“ Let it be noted, also, that those tertiary species which have continued with little change down to our days are the marine animals of the lower grades, especially mollusca. Their low organization, moderate sensibility, and the simple conditions of an existence in a medium like the ocean, not subject to great variation and incapable of sudden change, may well account for their continuance ”

“ Most mammals are terrestrial, living, that is to say, not only on the land, but on the ground, and are herbivorous in habit, subsisting chiefly or exclusively upon vegetable substances, but there are many departures from this mode of life. It should be explained, however, that the term terrestrial is frequently used in a more comprehensive sense for all land mammals, as distinguished from those that are aquatic or marine. ”

“ Hunter with the small hand-dredge brought up abundant samples of life from depths ranging to fifty fathoms. In water shallower than ten fathoms the variety of specimens was not great, including seaweeds up to eighteen or more feet in length, a couple of forms of starfish, various small mollusca, two or three varieties of fish, several sea-spiders, hydroids and lace corals, and, in great profusion, worms and small crustaceans. In deeper waters the life became much richer, so that examples of almost every known class of marine animals were represented. ”

“ In temperate and arctic lands such numbers of large mammals could exist only where the vegetation not only sufficed for summer needs, but retained its nourishing qualities through the winter. In the sea the vast numbers of seals, sea-lions, walruses, and whales of many kinds could be maintained only by a limitless profusion of fishes and other marine life. ”

“ The vertebræ of its backbone are not biconcave, but flat in front and behind. And, finally, we discover that it suckles its young. It, too, is in all its deep-seated characteristics a mammal. It is fish-like only in characteristics which it might easily have acquired in adaptation to its aquatic life. And there are other aquatic mammals, like the seals, in which these characteristics are much less marked. Their adaptation has evidently not gone so far. ”

“ Perhaps the most that can with safety be predicated, at present, is that there probably exists some marine animal of colossal size, and lengthened form, which has not yet been received into systematic zoology. ”

“ That to assume that naturalists have perfect cognisance of every existing marine animal of large size, would be quite unwarrantable. It appears to me more than probable that many marine animals, unknown to science, and some of them of gigantic size, may have their ordinary habitat in the sea, and only occasionally come to the surface; and I think it not impossible that amongst them may be marine snakes of greater dimensions than we are aware of, and even a creature having close affinities with the old sea-reptiles whose fossil skeletons tell of their magnitude and abundance in past ages. ”

“ The plumage of the tropical birds, the down on the most brilliant butterfly's wing, are not more beautiful in coloring than the hues of many Radiates, and there is no grace of motion surpassing the movements of some of them in their native element. The habit of keeping marine animals in tanks is happily growing constantly more popular, and before long the beauty of these inhabitants of the ocean will be as familiar to us as that of Birds and Insects. ”

“ Those of the invertebrates that breathe air reach no farther back than the fishes, possibly not so far. On the other hand, all - 9 - the leading groups of marine invertebrates run without interruption back to the Lower Cambrian, and some of them still farther. Thus it would appear that for long ages before the introduction of land or air-breathing animals of any kind, the sea swarmed with animal life, which was almost as varied as that which now inhabits it. ”

“ The physical part of a man marks him as a Mammal. To Mammals belong all Quadrupeds; but not Birds, not Reptiles, not Fishes.
A whale is not a fish. He is a Mammal. He is warm-blooded. He breathes air through lungs. He—or rather, she—feeds the young of the race, as they are fed by quadrupeds and human beings on land. A whale-mother will fight to the death in defence of her little one.
Nor is the whale the only Mammal of ocean-waters. To this highest division of backboned creatures belong also the Porpoise, a near relative of the Whale; and the fierce Walrus, met often by Arctic travellers ”

“ A well-known zoologist has said: "The food-supply of marine animals consists of a few species of microscopic organisms which are inexhaustible and the only source of food for all the inhabitants of the ocean. The supply is primeval as well as inexhaustible, and all the life of the ocean has gradually taken shape in direct dependence on it." The marine Protozoa are the only animals which live independently; they alone can live or could have lived in earlier ages without depending on other animals. They must therefore be the oldest of marine animals. ”

“ Such are all beasts, birds, reptiles, and fishes. There are also a variety of remotely allied marine organisms known as tunicates, sea-squirts, or ascidians (Fig. 2) . There is, further, an immense group of arthropods, consisting of all insects, crab-like creatures, hundred-legs and their allies, with spiders, scorpions, tics and mites. We have also the sub-kingdom of shell-fish or molluscs, [pg 359] including cuttle-fishes, snails, whelks, limpets, the oyster, and a multitude of allied forms. ”

“ Being mostly small and defenceless creatures, lurking among the marine vegetation of the shoals and reefs, they are usually accustomed to cling for support by their snake-like tails to the stalks or leaves of those submerged forests. The omniscient schoolboy must often have watched in aquariums the habits and manners of the common sea-horses, twisted together by their long thin bodies into one inextricable mass of living matwork, or anchored firmly with a treble serpentine coil to some projecting branch of coralline or of quivering sea-wrack. ”

“ In other words, if for convenience we define a Mammal by its form of brain, structure of the heart and lungs, and provision for nutrition of the young, without regard to the covering of the skin, which varies between the scales of a pangolin and the practically naked skin of the whale—a bird might be also defined by its peculiar conditions of brain and lungs, without reference to the feathered condition of the skin, though the feathered condition extends backward in time to the Upper Secondary rocks, as seen in the Archæopteryx. ”

“ Whales bring forth living young; they breathe atmospheric air through their lungs in place of water through gills, having also a double heart and warm blood, like land animals. Flying-fish are frequently seen, queer little creatures, resembling the smelts of our northern waters. While exhibiting the nature of a fish, they have also the soaring ambition of a bird. Hideous, man-eating sharks are sure to follow in the ship's wake, watching for some unfortunate victim of a sailor or passenger who may fall overboard, and eagerly devouring any refuse thrown from the cook's galley. ”

“ Though objects of never-ending interest to every one who journeys through the warmer seas, flying fishes do not really fly. They merely skim for long distances through the air, just as the flying squirrel and the flying dragon do; but instead of having a broad parachute-like membrane to buoy them up, they are supported in the air by the pectoral or breast fins, which are very large. These fins do not beat the air, like the wings of a bird. They merely support the body. And the power of the so-called flight is due to a stroke of the tail just as the fish leaves the water. ”