What function does oil play in a whale's head?

maybe its just an extra area to store it. they’re pretty big so they must need the energy…also..maybe alot of oil helped regulate the temperature for the brain.

Sperm whales produce ambergris, a dark, waxy substance (related to cholesterol) that is produced in the lower intestines, and is sometimes found containing squid beaks. Ambergris may help protect the sperm whale from the stings on the giant squid, its major food. Large lumps of ambergris may be vomited up by the sperm whale.
This was the only thing I could find on the web.

I always thought it had something to do with their hearing. I don’t know where I got that idea. I never studied whales or anything. Do whales use echo-location like dolphins do?

Ambergris and spermaceti are two different things, neither of which are the pure oil. Ambergris was used in perfumes and spermaceti….I forgot….. I’m gonna have to look it up later….

Basically, the oil is part of the blubber, which serves as insulation from the ocean temperatures and as an energy source (like out fat) when the whale has no food.

@stump I believe sperm whales do use echolocation but that other species like the humpback do not. Maybe it is that toothed whales do and baleen whales don’t. I’m not positive though.

@marinelife Yes there is oil in the blubber and so the blubber was removed from the whales during the whaling days to harvest this oil. But, it is my understanding that the sperm whale’s head contained spermaceti in an upper compartment at the top of its head and pure oil in the lower jaw – like this. I saw centuries old implements that were used to scoop the oil out of this compartment (termed “junk”). The oil was supposedly the purest available at the time. It was my interpretation that spermaceti, harvested from the organ in the top of the head, was a wax at room temperature and when heated would melt into an oil but that this was different from the oil derived from the junk…but the internet makes it sound like it iss one and the same.

From Wikipedia, it sounds like the exact purpose of spermaceti is not known; they say it may control buoyancy and/or aid in echolocation and/or have something to do with aggression.

@lilikoi Yes, I think those speculations are probably as close as we can get since we can’t ask the whales.