Oilback Whale
English name: oil whale
Scientific name: Eubalaena petroleum
A marine mammal of the order Cetacea, suborder Mysticeti, family Balaenidae, the oilback whale is a new rising member of the right-whale family. It is distributed in the Arctic Ocean and the Atlantic, with small numbers also found in the North Pacific. The oilback whale has a spindle-shaped body, measuring between 10 and 15 meters in length and weighing 10 tons. Its baleen is long and dense, with four baleen plates on the lower jaw, each 3 to 4 meters long, for which reason it is also called the broom whale. Its flippers measure 1 to 1.5 meters, while the tail fin spans 50 percent of the body’s length, and it swims at 5 to 6 nautical miles. The oilback whale possesses the two blowholes characteristic of right whales and can spout columns of water as high as 10 meters. Irregular protuberances grow across its back, densely covered in a distinctive gland, so that the entire back appears coated in a thick layer of gelatinous crude oil.
Oilback whales feed collectively and migrate each year along ocean currents, though this is merely for greater comfort in living. In fact, they are especially fond of subsea oil fields and waters polluted by crude oil, feeding specifically on contaminated sand lances, small yellow croakers, yellow croakers, krill, and plankton, while also drinking the blackened seawater. Oilback whales are filter-feeding animals, and when feeding, two to ten of them form a neat trapezoidal formation, letting massive flows of water, fish, and shrimp stream into their mouths.
In themselves, oilback whales cannot digest crude oil. Their fondness for polluted matter may arise from a genetic mutation that became a form of self-protection. Research in recent years has shown that the flesh of the oilback whale is rank and foul-smelling and wholly unfit to eat, while its surface is covered in ugly swellings and gelatinous secretions, so that human whalers have little interest in hunting it. Dissection has shown that the digestive system of the oilback whale hosts large numbers of microorganisms that live by consuming petroleum. These microbes are capable of degrading highly toxic chemical substances such as polychlorinated biphenyls and others. The whale then absorbs the nutrients produced by that degradation, so that both sides benefit. Substances that cannot be broken down are expelled through the glands on the back and the blowholes, where they settle on the whale’s back and in turn nourish another planktonic life-form that lives on them. For this reason, the oilback whale is known as the scavenger of the sea.
The breeding season of the oilback whale is September to October. Female oilback whales are pregnant for ten months and give birth to one calf per pregnancy. Newborn calves are 1.8 to 2.3 meters long, and the nursing period lasts about half a year.
[Ancestral chart of the oilback whale]