50-year-old discovery in Aussie museum sparks surprising #whale theory.
Little is known about the rare creatures pulled from the #blowhole of a #beached whale in 1973.
A rare #parasite could offer a clue behind a spate of mysterious #strandings of pilot whales.
#Researchers from Australia believe when the long, slimy, #nematodes lodge themselves inside the blowhole it affects the host’s #behaviour.
“Imagine you have thousands of these objects, each of them three to five centimetres long, sitting in that blow hole and just clogging it,” Professor Shokoofeh Shamsi told Yahoo News.
The Charles Sturt University parasite expert and her colleague Dr Diane Barton have developed a theory that the infection in their blowholes could be #disrupting the ability of pilot whales to #navigate and #communicate.
Their investigation was sparked after a vial of unidentified nematodes was rediscovered in the archives of a #Tasmanian
museum, which were originally scraped from the blowhole of a beached pilot whale more than 50 years ago. The outcome of that research has been published in the Journal of Diseases of Aquatic Organisms this month.
#auspol #PilotWhales #MassStrandings
https://au.news.yahoo.com/50-year-old-discovery-in-aussie-museum-sparks-surprising-whale-theory-073736115.html