Flatulent whales caught in the act
Discovery News
Thursday, 28 August 2003
"The picture is of an Antarctic minke whale taken from the bow of a ship," said AAD principal research scientist Dr Nick Gales. "The white bits in the photo are pieces of ice-floe, the stream of pinky colour behind the whale is a faecal plume - a.k.a. "poo" - the large circle in the water is indeed the physical eruption of the whale's flatulence."
... Australian Antarctic Division scientists have developed a method that allows them to collect whale faeces and study its DNA to figure out what the whale recently consumed.
The DNA work is linked to whale protection, since countries such as Norway, Iceland, and Japan have argued that whale numbers should be reduced to stabilise commercial fishing stocks...
Quicktime movie of burn-off
