Science
Related: About this forumLike a tree's rings, blue whale's earwax tells a story of its life (LA Times)
Their new technique, described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, arms researchers with a tool to understand a whales hormonal and chemical biography -- and a window into how pollutants, some long discontinued, still pervade the environment today.
Whales are often called marine sentinels because they can reveal a lot about the waters they pass through, said study coauthor Sascha Usenko, an analytical environmental chemist at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.
"These types of marine mammals that are long-lived have a great ability to accumulate contaminants, and so theyre often perceived as being sentinels of their ecosystem," Usenko said.
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http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-blue-whale-ear-wax-plug-pollutants-hormones-20130916,0,6647217.story
And from a bit later in the article:
"It doesnt necessarily smell great.... When we were pulling it out, some of the crew actually just left."
Pretty cool: I've heard about otoliths used for fisheries and paleoclimate research, but earwax is a whole new ball of... well, you know...
KT2000
(20,609 posts)very valuable info here.
MADem
(135,425 posts)eppur_se_muova
(36,317 posts)I wonder if this was a pathological case, like some kind of blockage ? Not clear from the article.
petronius
(26,614 posts)and even that there are lighter and darker layers associated with periods of feeding and migration (there's an image in Fig. 1):
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/09/10/1311418110.full.pdf+html
It's really bizarre - gotta give a lot of credit to whoever first thought of checking it out...
AnneD
(15,774 posts)Their life is underwater. They need something water tight, resists changes in pressure, but let them hear sound waves. Actually, wax would be good.
Skraxx
(2,987 posts)But it's not fit for virgin ears.
What will they do when whales discover q-tips? Game over man.
Tyrs WolfDaemon
(2,289 posts)I hope you are at least using some kind of protection, like ear-plugs or q-tip condoms.
And what's wrong with a virgin-ear? They have to learn some how.