the.com/baleen
Nature's hairy sieve lets the ocean's largest animals eat its smallest.
means Baleen is the comb-like plates of keratin that hang from the upper jaws of certain whales, used to strain tiny prey like krill and plankton from mouthfuls of seawater.
from The word traces back through French baleine and Latin balaena to Greek phalaina, meaning 'whale.' So the name didn't originally point to the sieve-like plates at all — it simply meant the animal itself, and over time in English 'baleen' narrowed to name the whalebone-like material people harvested from its mouth, once prized for corsets and buggy whips before plastic replaced it.
- made of
- keratin, same stuff as your fingernails
- not teeth
- whales traded teeth for filtering combs
- once called
- whalebone, though it bends like plastic
- corset history
- 19th century fashion stripped whales for stiffening