Dutch researcher Yakamoz Kizildas goes out on Skjalfandi Bay in Iceland with a special rifle. She’s after humpback whales. Oh, a rifle isn’t a good choice for hunting… unless you’re hunting genetic data. She gets close to whales and shoots a dart that picks off a small bit of tissue. She then has the task of going right up to the floating sample to retrieve it.
I have to assume that the whale is not going to pull a Moby Dick attack; certainly Yakamoz is still alive and is continuing her master’s degree research. The DNA is the tissue is a name tag, as it were, that identifies each individual whale. With other data over 34 years by other scientists, these samples have identified over 6,500 humpbacks in the North Atlantic Ocean. Why go through the work and the danger to know Hans from Hals from Greta? (I don’t think the scientists have made up 6,500 names like those.) The data are used to track where thousands of whales in each of two big populations feed and breed. This informs the ways that whales are conserved and managed.
Rapacious hunting of the endangered mammals is now down, officially, to a few a year by subsistence hunters. Their amazing bubble-netting of fish is still in play, along with other phenomena of wonder.
This has been an outreach activity of the Las Cruces Academy, viewable at GreatSchools.org.
Source: Nature, 19 Sept. 24
