After a brief intermission and without warning the curtain rises again. The windows ( which we may remember from Act 1 are nine over nines) are closed now and the stiles and mullions hard-rimed. (If you prefer you may substitute “muntins” for “mullions” and “hoarfrosted” for “rimed”and not much corrupt the core meaning. Although all of those panes will still be hard-rimed.) And here we might (probably will) take a break from the theatre and deconstruct the title of the blog which is “baleen journal.” So here you go. (If for any reason, you object to the preceding or ensuing content, you could return to Act 1. Search for spelling errors, perhaps, and the rest of us will catch up with you back at “rimed windows.” So, a baleen whale sports long parallel plates attached to its upper jaw. These plates have bristles (also known as whalebone hair) on the end. Baleen length ranges from a foot and a half to more than eleven feet. They may way up to 200 pounds. They form, in effect, a sieve. You have undoubtedly already kenned that the size of the baleen is likely porportionate to the size of the whale. Now, here comes the cool part. The whale (whose throat is quite flexible) takes in a large amount of water and along with it whatever is on the day’s menu: shoaling fish, krill, copepods, untended pets, small children, etc. The cetacean (fancy for whale) than forces the water out around either side of its tongue. Water flows through the baleen and dinner gets trapped there and swallowed. Repeat. We, likewise, will frequently take in large amounts of seawater (also known as bilge), blow it out and see what manner of things we have trapped. In this case we found window parts. There is a great deal more information about not only window parts but also the evolution of baleen; however, I can’t imagine there were enough misspellings to keep the disenchanted busy for long, so I suggest we return to the theatre.
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