When the Whale's Ear Aches.

Otago Witness, Issue 2856, 9 December 1908, Page 76

When the Whale's Ear Aches.

- —Leaps Out of the Water Due to the Torture by a Parasite. — j It was a story told by a- whaler who retired from the sea when the catch of the deep-sea game had so fallen off that there was no longer any profit in a captain's lay, even with the added earnings from the slop ohest. But as it has been confirmed by the zoologists of the Fish Commission the truth of the story is unassailable. ' > When the whales were still frequent along the lanes of passenger travel across the western ocean nothing was more common than to see the greate beasts, hurling their tons of bulk clean out of the waves, and a-fter a flight through the air falling back into the sea with an enormous splash and jets of foam, a spectacle never failing of interest to the ocean tourist, but not duo to any gleesome sportive disposition on the part of the leviathan of the deep. j Quite the contrary, the breaching of the whale is no fun for the beaet; it is a frantic effort to rid himself of the torment of earache. There is a marine crustacean whose aim in a maritime career is io pester whales to the verge of endurance, and there seems reason to believe that some whales have been driven insane by their tiny para-t-iteo. It is a crab of about die size of that which is found in the oyster. When it ledges on the whale it infests the inuer duiface of the eyelids and the aar. ' 13v swift rushes on the surface the whale i« able to clear his eye?, but the crab in the inner ear cannot be dislodged by any such means. One can only imagine the 90-foot anguish of a whale when one or more of theve tiny foes walk with needlepointed claws up and down the drum of the ear. Hence in the effort to dislodge tho pe=L the performance which seems 6O picturesque to the voyager.—New York Sun. ;