Whale Fart Captured in Photo
Posted: 2003-09-01 06:18am
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20 ... legas.html
Whale Flatulence Captured in Photo
Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News
A Whale's Gas Bubble And Fecal Plume
Aug. 27, 2003 — For the first time, scientists have both witnessed and photographed a whale gas bubble, suggesting that flatulence is just as common for ocean mammals as it is for humans and many other terrestrial animals.
The picture is best described by Nick Gales, principal research scientist in the Applied Marine Mammal Ecology Group of the Australian Antarctic Division in Tasmania. Gales was leading an expedition of the Charolotte Pass between Marguerite Bay and Palmer Station, Antarctica, when the ship's captain, Joe Borkowski III, took the photo.
"The picture is of an Antarctic minke whale taken from the bow of a ship," Gales explained. "The white bits in the photo are pieces of ice-floe, the stream of pinky color behind the whale is a fecal plume — a.k.a. "poo" — the large circle in the water is indeed the physical eruption of the whale's flatulence."
The experience was memorable in many ways.
"The general rule that flatulence is worse than halitosis is certainly also true for whales," said Gales, who had to flee the bow of the ship shortly after the whale's natural release was observed, and smelled.
Gales and his colleagues are working to determine what it is that higher marine predators eat, and where they go to eat it. Instead of resorting to killing whales, the Australian Antarctic Division scientists have developed a method that allows them to collect whale feces and study its DNA to figure out what the whale recently consumed.
The DNA work is linked to whale protection, since countries such as Norway, Iceland, and Japan have argued that whale numbers should be reduced to stabilize commercial fishing stocks.
"Sadly, some countries are promoting very simple interpretations of the way whale food consumption interacts with fishery yields, effectively arguing that if the whales did not eat those fish, then fishery yields would improve," Gales told Discovery News. "In reality, marine food webs are extremely complex and the relationship between what one of many predators eat, in this case whales, and a fishery yield is distant and may not even be direct."
He explained that whales also consume predators of many commercial species, and that other issues, including when and where whales eat, and what age class of a commercial species is affected by whales, complicate the debate.
Daniel Costa, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in the Long Marine Laboratory of the University of California, Santa Cruz, agrees that whale numbers should not be further reduced by humans, their sole predator.
"The available data for whales suggests that their populations are well below the carrying capacity of the environment and thus there is no danger of them overeating their prey," said Costa.
Costa added, "The fate of whales is intimately associated with the fate of its prey."
He explained that whales' major prey, krill, a type of crustacean, is being reduced by climate change, which could cause problems for whales and many other Antarctic species that rely upon krill as a food source.
Gales, Costa, and several other scientists next month will study and tag Pacific whales and other pelagic animals in coordinated efforts to monitor individual species and to better understand the ocean food chain.
Does this deserve a response?
That's one hell of a strange story anyway....
