Gigantic whales have nerves like bungee cords: study

By Park Sae-jin Posted : May 13, 2015, 16:50 Updated : May 13, 2015, 16:50

 

Nerves in general are not very extensible, while "nerve stretch injury" is a common form of nerve trauma in humans. But Canadian and U.S. researchers said Monday rorqual whales have nerves in their mouths and tongues that can stretch like bungee cords.

"This discovery was totally unexpected and unlike other nerve structures we've seen in vertebrates, which are of a more fixed length," study author Wayne Vogl of the University of British Columbia (UBC) said in a statement.

The elastic nerves, which can more than double their length with no trouble, support the animals' unique and extreme lunge feeding strategy, the researchers reported in the U.S. journal Current Biology.

Rorqual whales represent the largest group among baleen whales weighing 40 to 80 tons, and include blue whales and fin whales.

To eat, the whales open their mouths and lunge while their tongues invert and their mouths fill like giant water balloons full of floating prey.

Those prey are concentrated by slowly expelling the water through baleen plates. The volume of water brought in with a single gulp can exceed the volume of the whale itself.

"Rorqual whales attained large body size with the evolution of a bulk filter feeding mechanism based on engulfing huge volumes of prey-laden water," Vogl said. "This required major changes in anatomy of the tongue and ventral blubber to allow large deformation, and now we recognize that this also required major modifications in the structure of nerves in these tissues so they could withstand the tissue deformation."

By Ruchi Singh
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