The Mouth That Cannot Swallow a Bread Roll
The Greenland whale reaches a hundred feet in length and cannot swallow anything much larger than a shrimp. Its throat measures "not exceeding an inch and a half in width" — so narrow, the book says, that the animal "would be choked by a penny roll."[1]
It feeds by straining instead. More than three hundred plates of baleen hang on each side of the upper jaw, so thickly haired inside that nothing escapes them, "even of the size of the smallest grain."
And its size hides one more vulnerability. Because it breathes air, a whale can drown. Tie a weight to it so that it cannot reach the surface, the book notes, and it "might be as easily drowned as a dog."
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