Fig. 5. Graph of the modeled peak accelerations of the target and attack whales
during a collision at 3 m s-1 for different ratios of damping
constants. Each line extending from the origin illustrates the accelerations
that the model produced for a given ratio of damping constants for the tissue
and spermaceti dampers. The number beside each line is the ratio of the tissue
damping constant of the target whale to the spermaceti damping constant of the
attacking whale. The magnitude of damping increases as the lines extend from
the origin. As the ratio becomes larger, the accelerations experienced by the
target whale become larger relative to the accelerations of the attacking
whale. Twice the acceleration due to gravity (2g=19.6 m
s-2) is the estimated acceleration above which fatal injury is
likely to occur for a vertebrate the size of the modeled whales
(Farlow et al., 2000). Hence,
the area above the horizontal line represents accelerations that would
probably injure the target whale and but not the attacking whale. The filled
circle on the line for a damper constant ratio of 16 represents the damping
constants used for the sample acceleration traces shown in
Fig. 6.
