(Note added late – This post was expected to be brief, but took all morning. It takes too slow to develop, sure, but bear with it. It has a twist. The latter pertains to press releases and some of the authors’ efforts to head off what they see in errors in coverage, yet appear to have roots in their own institutions. It remains in the sequence written, with elements arising in the order they arose during composition. / cp)
Suppose you’re an obedient little krill, minding your own business in the school’s swirlings when O! MY GOODNESS!! a great darkness arrives from seemingly nowhere. The ocean sweeps you and your pals into it. Lights out and adios. If it is a blue whale that you just nourished your demise came courtesy of what whale expert Don Croll of UC Santa Cruz told me 11 years ago is the largest biomechanical event on Earth. It’s an easy phrase to remember. The childlike delight in learning what’s fastest, hottest, biggest, meanest, oldest, farthest, strongest or anything else -est has not waned. It’s an itch that science writing lets one scratch while being paid to do it. It’s not just the monster blue whales that rely on such violent ingestion. They are rorquals, the main subset of baleen whales. Members of that clan rush into clouds of supper, krill or herring or whatever, gape their jaws wide, and ram godawful amounts of sea water into pleated expandable gullet pouches extending to near their tails. Step Two: squeeze jaws shut, strain water out, and swallow the startled and wriggling nuggets of fat and protein left behind. All in a few seconds.
The news is that scientists from the Smithsonian Institution and from a place near loads of lunge-feeding humpback and other whales, the University of British Columbia in Victoria (correction! It’s in Vancouver, and not the island but the city), announced in Nature this week they found pretty much by accident the lunge-feeding command center. They dissected fin and other whales in Iceland, where whaling is still legal. Then they checked some other, available carcasses of other whales. Ditto. How’d whale anatomists miss this till now? It is a bundle of nerves big as a softball tucked into the front of a rorqual’s jaw between the ends of its two separate left and right jawbones. It seems to manage the sequence based on inputs from up and down the jaw and gullet to shut mouth at 
just the right time to get maximum yield. Its discovery is why it is news but the story’s muscle comes from THE LARGEST BIOMECHANICAL EVENT ON EARTH. Ever. You gotta love it. Not even T. rex or Titanoboa could match it. It’s like a few years ago when scientists figured out how snapping shrimp snap. The cavitation mechanism was the news, and interesting enough. But the fun was that it allows the shrimp to contend for LOUDEST NOISE IN NATURE.
A fine rendition on the lunge feeding sensory organ is at KPIU, NPR’s affiliate in Seattle, by Keith Seinfeld. The audio is good, but the on line text is better because it is longer and carries embedded videos. Seinfeld has an outside nervous system expert in it. She tells him the whale’s jaw-brain thing is distinct but its general function is related to ones in other animals. An example is the system that provides body awareness including ability to sense whether ones fingers are straight or bent without looking.
Other Stories:
- PostMedia via Victoria Times Colonist – Margaret Munro: Kriller Instinct ; Cute hed, and her lede is: “It’s the largest biomechanical event on Earth.” Maybe the guy who told me that exact phrase so long ago said it to everybody. Maybe it’s just what cetacean experts say about it all the time. Or, maybe my own story got it embedded in the collective web unconscious! Maybe I have no idea.
- From the caught red-handed drawer we pull RedOrbit : Newly discovered Organ Could Explain Size, Eating Habits of Some Whales ; Actually maybe not. RedOrbit attributes this yarn to “staff and wire reports.” That is, we’re looking at an aggregation mill. Perhaps we get an inkling why, at a FAQ site in the whale lab site at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History (see Grist) it has a list of things the study does NOT say, including “Our study does not tell us how nor why whales evolved to such extremely large body size.” This suggest somebody in that lab is really ticked off at some members of the science so-called journalism corps. Now to find where this fabulation arose… (By the way, says stuffy old me, the FAQ writer should’ve known that a nor works best when following a neither.)
- AFP via Melbourne Herald Sun: Scientists discover the sensory organ that makes whales huge ; See preceding bullet.
WAIT, HOLD IT!! The AFP story’s writer didn’t just, one immediately suspected on reading the preceding, pull that headline’s meaning out of his or her hat. Several accounts follow the same line. A closer look at UBC’s press release finds a smoking gun, or quote. A co-author there, it says, feels that this sensory organ not only is an intimate part of the most extreme feeding event in the sea, but “is responsible for rorquals claiming the largest-animals-on-earth status.” So maybe whoever at the lead author’s lab wrote that FAQ has main quarrel with one of the co-authors, or the author of the UBC press release. But wait even more – the Smithsonian’s own release declares ” This organ has a fundamental role in one of the most extreme feeding methods in aquatic vertebrates, which facilitated the evolution of the largest vertebrates ever.” And Nature’s promo-graf in its advance press materials says the discovery pertains to how the animals evolved feeding styles suited to such large size. No matter what releases said, for sure reporters who looked only at them but didn’t call any of the researchers to verify quotes and get some fresh ones ought to have done so. Maybe they’d have come upon a tiff – nothing like a squabble to propel a story along – among the researchers over the significance of this organ for why these whale are so big. From the sidelines here at ksjtracker it’s hard to say what happened on this angle. But it does seem logical to suppose, if not prove, that some rorquals got big with the help of a selection-feedback synergism in the co-evolution of size and of this organ. Back to the track…
- LiveScience – Jennifer Welsh: Special organ in jaw helps whales take big gulps ;
- NYTimes Green blog – Kelly Slivka: A Secret Behind the Whale’s Mighty Gulp ; Nice piece, especially the surprise by an outside expert. He’s been cutting up whales on beaches for years, and has cut through this organ but had not stopped to ponder what it was for. Now he’s going to start paying attention, looking for differences and species patterns.
- Discover Magazine/Not Exactly Rocket Science – Ed Yong: New sense organ helps giant whale to coordinate the world’s biggest mouthfuls ; Yong includes reference to a site with a just amazing photo of a whale, I’m guessing Minke, in full, mid-gulp bloat.
- Discovery News – Jennifer Viegas: How The Blue Whale Eats Whatever It Wants ; Sure, but all it wants is krill.
- Daily Mail (UK) Rob Waugh: Entirely new ‘grapefruit-sized’ organ found in jaws of giant whales – is it a ‘second brain’ build to help them eat more? ; More with the evolution of size angle, apparently drawn entirely from press release easy pickings.
- BBC – Victoria Gill: How whales open their huge mouths ;
- ScienceNOW – Elizabeth Pennisi: Whoopee Cushion-Sized Organ Helps Whales Feed ; Funny, how a story on a collapsible pouch got the headline writer in mind of whoopee cushions.
Grist for the Mill: Univ. British Columbia Press Release ; Smithsonian Press Release ; Smithsonian Institution Pyenson Lab FAQ on whale paper including implied mistakes in news coverage.
– Charlie Petit
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