Thanks to museum curators, there’s no shortage of the stuff.
- It’s just been discovered that whale earwax contains a record of a whale’s sub-lethal stressors.
- It’s generally agreed that cortisol is a reliable indicator of a mammal’s response to stress.
- We now have a detailed 146-year impact study of human activity on whales.
Baleen whales (Mysticeti) have been subjected to human interference for a long time. The 14-member set, which includes humpbacks, minke whales and blue whales, has dealt with being hunted, increased boat traffic and fishing, noise, and pollution. It’s been difficult to ascertain the effect all this has had on individual whales, though, due to the challenges involved in collecting hormones and tracking changes over single whale’s lifetime. Baleens themselves can provide some information, but just for the last decade. However, a remarkable long-term record of a whale’s stress history has been discovered: the whale’s earwax plug […]
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