Thar she blows: Snot offers clues to whale health What is the strangest thing you could do with a remote-controlled toy helicopter? To strap on a few Petri dishes and fly it through whale snot must be high on the list.
That is how Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, a veterinarian and conservation biologist with the Zoological Society of London, has spent much of her time over the past few years.
Of course, there's a serious reason for such work - Acevedo-Whitehouse is, for the first time, making it possible to study the viruses, fungi and bacteria that hitch a ride in whale lungs.
Researchers can fairly easily take blood samples from other marine mammals, such as seals and sea lions, but whales' sheer bulk rules out such sampling without killing them.
"Scientists have always found it difficult to study diseases in whales because of their size," explains Acevedo-Whitehouse. "Most studies on whale pathogens have focused on dead, stranded or captive animals, which are hardly representative of the normal population.
Snot collectorAfter witnessing the sheer power of whale "blows" in the Gulf of California, she realised that this would be the best way of sampling the insides of a live whale in the ocean.
She first tried tying herself to a research boat and leaning overboard to catch a bit of whale "snot" in Petri dishes. "It worked," she says, "but it wasn't very safe."
Her technique is now somewhat more sophisticated. For species like grey and sperm whales that do not mind being close to a boat, the researchers attach their Petri dishes to a long pole and hold them out over the blows.
With the shyer blue whale, they have had to resort to toy-sized helicopters. The Petri dishes are attached to the side of the metre-long choppers, which are remotely flown through whale blows.
"The whales definitely notice the helicopter," says Acevedo-Whitehouse, "they turn on their sides to look at it. But they don't seem bothered. We are collecting very relevant biological information without harming them in the least - we don't even touch them."
The team has taken samples from more than 120 whales in the Gulf of California and off Gibraltar. Each time also sampling the background ocean spray as a control. This lets them identify which bugs come from the whales, and which are present in the sea.
The samples are taken back to the lab and scanned for specific DNA sequences that identify individual bacteria, fungi and viruses. As well as looking for pathogenic bugs similar to flu or TB, the researchers are trying to build a profile of what microbes a healthy whale normally carries in its lungs.
In the long run, these microbe profiles will be compared to ones sampled from beached whales. With the help of colleagues at Cicimar in Mexico, who have been tracking the Gulf of California whales for over 20 years, the team also hope to study how bacteria and viruses spread through whale populations.
That'd be a fun thing to do with toy helicopters.
Not sure I'd want to be the one analysing the whale snot though,
Topic: Snot offers clues to whale health