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| Mother and baby sperm whale (Gabriel Barathieu, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons) |
- Cetacean - a fully aquatic, air-breathing marine mammal belonging to the biological order Cetacea, which includes whales, dolphins, and porpoises
- Pyloric stomach (or pyloric chamber) - the final multi-chambered compartment of the stomach system in whales and other cataceans before it connects to the small intestine.
- Ambergris - a solid, waxy, flammable substance produced in the digestive system of sperm whales.
- Baleen - a row of flexible, horny plates made of keratin that hang from the upper jaws of certain filter-feeding whales instead of teeth.
- Flensing - the act of stripping the blubber, skin, or outer fat layer from a marine mammal, such as a whale or seal.
- Blubber - a thick layer of vascularised adipose tissue (fat) found directly beneath the skin of marine mammals like whales, seals and walruses.
- Spermaceti - a waxy, semi-liquid substance found inside specialised head cavities (the spermaceti organ and "junk") of sperm whales and some other cetaceans.
- Harpoon - a long, barbed, spear-like tool or weapon used to pierce, capture, and haul in large marine animals such as whales, sharks, seals or large fish.
- Krill - small, shrimp-like marine crustaceans belonging to the order Euphausiacea that live in all of the world's oceans. Baleen whales (blue, humpback, fin, minke, etc) depend on krill as their primary food source. A blue whale can consume up to 4-17.6 tons (3.6 to 16 metric tons) of krill a day during the feeding season.
- Flukes - the horizontal lobes of a whale's tail
