Has there ever been an attempt to determine the bite force of a sperm whale? I think that I remember reading that they could smash through the whaler’s boats with their teeth. (Of course, they also demolished the boats with their massive tail flukes.) Just wondering, don’t need answer fast…
Maybe not an extant sperm whale but one of there have been some guesses made about one of it’s ancestors. The article proposes that an earlier relative of the sperm whale, Leviathan melvillei , could exceed the bite force of a pliosaur, “a calculated power of over 15 tons or 33,000 pounds of bite force”. .
Modern sperm whales only have lower teeth, an indication they have considerably less bite force than their predecessor.
I actually was thinking about the impressive extinct sea-critter “livyatan melvillei” when I formulated the question. I know that they were true macro-predators and needed the bite-force. I’ve heard that modern sperm whales tend to rely on suction to ingest the cephalopods that they consume. I just figured that some of the prodigious bite-force might have been retained, since it might be useful in fending off male rivals, or the occasional pesky whaling boat.
Here’s one estimate of a killer whale’s bite force at over 19,000 PSI. That’s way over animals like wolves, tigers, and bears, but of course they are much larger animals. That’s probably a better guess than can be established for a sperm whale but maybe something could be estimated based on their relative jaw sizes. Sperm whales are three times longer and ten times heavier than orca and they have different jaw configurations but the sperm whale’s bite force should potentially exceed an orca’s unless the whale has significantly underdeveloped jaw muscles compared to other animals.
Fascinating!
A “bite force” in PSI would actually be a pressure, not a force, and would be expected to be more or less the same for animals of different sizes. So an orca’s being much greater than a bear’s really is a significant fact.
How is that measured? Pounds per square inch of what? Total jaw area? Peak pressure at the tips of the first teeth to engage? I’ve seen this thrown out all the time for comparing animals, but I’ve never been quite clear on what it’s supposed to mean.
Does an animal with a really weak jaw acting on one sharp needle-like tooth have more or less “bite pressure” than an animal with a strong jaw acting over many teeth with a more “normal” tooth profile ?
I sure wouldn’t have wanted to be these guys: https://www.paulstreet.org/how/
This. When a sperm whale’s lower teeth are pushing material against soft tissue of the palate, they can’t exert a whole lot of bite force without damaging said palate. Moreover, those lower teeth are widely spaced, and they’re pointy. image here. These are not designed for slicing through soft tissue, or for crushing bones with sheer force. Contrast with a shark, whose closely speed serrated teeth definitely are made for shredding soft tissue, or a wolf, in which tightly spaced lower teeth close against tightly spaced upper teeth, providing two hard surfaces that can crush prey bones without injuring soft tissue in the wolf’s mouth.
A sperm whale’s prey (squid) doesn’t have bones, at least not in the tentacles. It only needs to clamp down on a tentacle hard enough for a good grip (those big point lower teeth help with that), then thrash to tear a hunk off. The inertia of the squid and the inertia of the whale work in the whale’s favor here.
Here is a paper on measuring bite force in animals. There are several methods described and if you look around at related articles you’ll find a lot more information. But what isn’t clear is what many of the reported measurements mean since they measure different kinds of biting in using different means of measurement. Testing dogs and cats and other controllable animals with strain gauges has been done for a while and there is probably good info from that to use in both physical and virtual modeling. I don’t know how good though if extrapolating to whale sized animals.
It may be possible to test the bite force of the sperm whale or even its smaller relatives, the pygmy sperm whale and the dwarf sperm whale if they can be convinced to bite on something containing a remote sensor. A measurement like that could be pretty accurate and reliable.
Quite a terrifying predicament!
Of course, they brought it on themselves, attacking that poor cetacean like that…
And I’ve seen pictures of the squid beaks they’ve eaten; looks like they’re swallowed whole.