New sense organ helps giant whales...

Just been reading this, and the other article linked from it. Fascinating stuff. yes

New sense organ helps giant whales to coordinate the world's biggest mouthfuls

Quote

The world's largest animals have been hiding something. The bodies of the giant rorqual whales (including the blue, fin and humpback) have been regularly displayed in museums, filmed by documentary makers, and harpooned by hunters. Despite this attention, no one noticed the volleyball-sized sense organ at the tips of their lower jaws. Nicholas Pyenson from the Smithsonian Institution is the first, and he thinks that the whales use this structure to coordinate the planet's biggest mouthfuls.

<snip>

Pyenson thinks that the new sense organ helps to coordinate this process. Together with Bob Shadwick, he discovered the structure by dissecting a dozen fin and minke whales, and by placing the jaws of one specimen in medical imaging scanners. "We had no idea what to make of it when we first saw it," says Pyenson. "It's a bit messy and gooey in life. Imagine a gel-filled balloon-like structure lodged between two telephone poles."

The organ was mentioned by Paul Brodie in 1993, but he interpreted it as a ball-and-socket joint. Pyenson disagrees. The gel around the organ contains many blood vessels and nerve endings, which come from a structure in the jawbone that was once the tooth socket of the first incisor, back when these whales still had teeth. These traits mark it out as a sense organ, and Pyenson thinks that it helps the whales to control the movement of their jaws during their titanic lunges.

Lunge-feeding isn't a passive process, where the incoming water inflates the mouth like a parachute. If that was the case, simulations show that either the whale's mouth would experience catastrophic blow-out, or the water would just rebound back out. Obviously, that doesn't happen as the oceans aren't littered with ruptured rorquals.

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Topic: New sense organ helps giant whales...

osmanthus

OP - June 01, 2012, 03:22 AM

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