HONG KONG: Scientists have stumbled upon one of the secrets behind the big gulps of the world’s biggest whales: the nerves in their jaws are stretchy.
Rorquals, a family that includes blue and humpback whales, feed by engulfing huge volumes of water and food, sometimes bigger than themselves.
Researchers made the discovery by inadvertently stretching a thick cable they found in the jaw of a fin whale.Most nerves are fragile and inelastic, so this find is first for vertebrates.The work is reported in the journal Current Biology.
A Canadian research team had travelled to Iceland to investigate some of these whales’ other anatomical adaptations to “lunge feeding” – things like their muscles, or the remarkable sensory organ in their jaws, discovered in 2012. They were working with specimens in collaboration with commercial whalers.
“It’s probably one of the only places in the world where you can do this sort of work, because these animals are so huge that even getting in through the skin is something you can’t do without having heavy machinery around,” said Prof Wayne Vogl, an anatomist at the University of British Columbia and the study’s first author.
When you are working with a 20m fin whale, it’s important to have the right equipment, he said. “If a heart falls on you, it could kill you.”
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