When Malcolm decided to study sperm whales, his first interest was in the whales’ physiology. He started his studies in Antarctica during the late 1950s, when British whalers were still hunting there. “I went to study the guts of whales,” he says, “and I discovered that a sperm whale’s gut, which I measured, was 706 feet (216 meters) long. So I turned to parasites. . . and found one 62 feet long (18.8 meters) and another 63 feet (19.2 meters).” He ultimately chose to study a relatively more accessible subject: the contents of sperm whales’ stomachs. Even that was not easy. “It once took me two days just to find the pancreas.”

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