We guarantee that everyone, from an informed child to a research biologist, will learn something new from a visit to this display.
Have you ever wondered, How big does a sperm whale grow, how old does it become, where does it live and how deep does it dive? Or, what does it eat, how does it catche its food, how does it find its food in the dark of the deep sea or how much do all the sperm whales of the World eat?
Have you ever thought about the different squids living in the deepest seas? Did you know they grow to 18m long, that they use jet propulsion, that their brains are more advanced than any other creature without a backbone, that they use lights as camouflage and ammonia for buoyancy.
Have you ever pondered how humans match up to whales and squids in dealing with environmental problems such as the dark, high pressure, low temperature and gravity.
This Museum explains all this and much more.
The sperm whale, Physeter catodon, is, undeniably, one of the most remarkable animals alive. It has restrictions imposed upon it by its land living mammalian ancestors and still manages to excel as a marine animal. It can dive deeper and hold its breath longer than any other marine mammal. It can endure extremes of pressure, temperature, density and darkness during its dives to catch species of squid which are rarely, if ever, caught by man and whose very existance, or importance in the sea, is only known from investigation of the sperm whale's stomach contents!
To cope with the extremes of its chosen environment, from the surface to 3000m depth, this largest of toothed cetaceans, has evolved many special anatomical, physiological and tactical specialities which are not described in any other museum of the World.
Here, the function of the great nose, the sonar and hearing, the quality of ambient light and sight, and other senses, the brain, behaviour, life cycle, migrations, ancestry, enemies, parasites and food are all illustrated, described and discussed. The great size is shown by a life sized painting of the anatomy of the largest female and the 'skin' of the largest male ever caught in the Azores.
The main food of this great whale is types of squid, very few of which have ever been seen by very few people. Sperm whales eat more than man catches of all marine species, probably more than twice as much, over 200 million tonnes each year! So are these little known jet propelled invertebrates of interest in their own right? We aim to show that they are, in the only museum in the World dealing in detail with this fascinating class of animals. Here you will learn of their extraordinary senses, divided brains, concord propulsion, jetsetting life cycles, light production, food catching mechanisms, cryptic trickery, and buoyancy mechanisms. And their size will not be neglected! Life sized models will show actual sizes of those eaten by sperm whales, right up to the 60 feet Architeuthis, the daddy of them all!
Squids will be used as an example to show some of the many unusual features of deep sea animals have evolved to cope with their environment.
