Baleen this issue. A whale's baleen plates play the most important role in its filter-feeding process. To feed, a baleen whale opens its mouth widely and scoops in dense shoals of prey (such as krill, copepods, small fish, and sometimes birds that happen to be near the shoals), together with large volumes of water. It then partly shuts its mouth and presses its tongue against its upper jaw, forcing the water to pass out sideways through the baleen, thus sieving out the prey, which it then swallows. People formerly used baleen (usually referred to as "whalebone") for making numerous items where
Baleen whale for their oil, which was used as lamp fuel and a lubricant, and baleen (or whalebone), which was used for items such as corsets and skirt hoops. The most successful whaling nations at this time were the Netherlands, Japan, and the United States. Commercial whaling was historically important as an industry well throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Whaling was at that time a sizable European industry with ships from Britain, France, Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Germany, sometimes collaborating to hunt whales in the Arctic. By the early 1790s, whalers, namely the British (Australian) and Americans, started to focus