What causes the scratches on the bodies of sperm whales?

It’s possible. One would presume that the sperm whale would grab the squid in its jaws from the head end to get a better grip and minimise the opportunity for the squid to manoeuvre its beak into biting range. This would potentially put its tentacles in the approximate area of the whale’s scarring.

Since we have visual evidence of scarring on whales from giant squid’s tentacle suckers, it seems reasonable to assume that the tentacle hooks of the even bigger colossal squid would also leave visible scar patterns.

We know from the contents of sperm whales’ stomachs that they eat giant and colossal squid. These rare photos show a female sperm whale with the remains of a 9-meter giant squid in its jaws and there are plenty of popular imaginings of squid vs sperm whale battles.

While there is no video footage of such encounters, I’ve found a couple of alleged eye-witness accounts of whale vs squid battles:

On the other hand, this photo shows that the sperm whale is able to open its jaw to a wider extent than one might expect, therefore giving creedence to the notion that a sperm whale would be physically able to rake its teeth against the side of another whale.