Baleen Whales
and The Break Wall
The break wall halves the Lake into a slab of glass and smokey swells. There’s a lighthouse at its end: a place of spiders and rust and fading sun on fading rocks where a leap of faith allows you to touch both. Likewise, the beaver dam divides the river. Streams and swirls of complex patterns wrap around debris while the sky mirrored sheet above is broken only by the beaver itself. The mouth of a culvert peeks out from the weedy shore, and a little way down is the place my brother goes to skip fishing hooks across the stream's rocky bottom.
The Lake and the river are where I grew up. They are where I ran, weaving along the pines, and found silent moments in the sand and the sun through the trees. They are the clear, icy waves I jumped in with friends, and the destination of groups like the environmental club that wanted only to give back. I was surrounded by water and its manipulations by man and nature, so when the term biomimicry first showed up for me in an academic context, the biology classroom my sophomore year of high school, the Lake and the river led me to choose baleen whale as the subject of my project.
Baleen whales survive by filtering masses of tiny prey such as krill from the ocean waters and, as the name suggests, have toothlike structures of flexible, keratinous baleen in order to do so. Like teeth, baleen extends from the upper gums. It is continuously growing and wearing away, hollow and layered like a bone, and has curved outer rod-like edges that soften to fine corn cob hairs that tangle and trap prey. Some whales have stretchy nerves and throat grooves that allow them to lunge like raptors and swallow huge amounts of prey-rich water while others, such as the right whale, are called skimmers. Right whales in particular parade upon the water's surface, barnacle sheathed noses held high and mouths open allowing water and unfortunate copepods to circulate within the mouth.
Humans call this mechanism cross flow filtration; water flows parallel in and out of the baleen filter while prey is swept to the back of the throat. As opposed to direct or perpendicular flow, cross flow filtration means very little debris gets stuck in between the baleen bristles or, in other words, whales don't have to brush their teeth. This is what I tried to replicate in my school project: a cobbled together model filter of colored popsicle sticks and paintbrushes. Even the large-scale model I envisioned, one that could be placed in rivers as the first step of a low energy, low maintenance water treatment, would depend on finding or creating an environmentally friendly material that mimics the carefully optimized strength and flexibility of baleen.
After this project I started to better notice and wonder at the functions of shape in everyday life: the hooks on burrs that help them cling to the fur of animals (the model for Velcro), the microscopic grooves that channel light into the surface of leaves for photosynthesis (a proposal for more efficient solar panels), and the heads of woodpeckers that absorb an incredible amount of shock (inspiration for hammers). It helped me better appreciate the Lake and river and all the natural world that surrounds me and, most of all, it made me excited about all there is left to learn.
