helicopter
oracknows | March 10, 2017[NOTE: As I mentioned yesterday, our power outage continues, and, thanks to having to decamp to a hotel last night, I didn't have time to produce new Insolence. So I thought I'd repost a "classic" from 11 years ago that I don't believe I've ever reposted before during vacation or otherwise. It represents a sort of blogging that I haven't done for years, just a personal story with nothing to do with my usual topics, such as pseudoscience, quackery, clinical trials, and basic science. This story is based on a real patient encounter from around 25 years ago, but details have been changed.]
I don…
jgoldman | April 21, 2010
Figure 1: Humpback whale
The question is: what do you use to study the health of whales in the wild?
The answer is: not what you'd think.
Unlike smaller sea mammals like seals or sea lions, it is very hard to obtain blood samples from whales without first killing them.
Meet Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, from the Zoological Society of London. She studies whale health, but has had to rely on dead, stranded or captive animals for blood samples, which are hardly representative of whales in the wild.
Figure 2: Dr. Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse
So what's the next best thing to whale blood? Well, SNOT,…
bleimanb | November 12, 2008The tiny, 3.5 ft. long helicopters in the video below hover over sperm whales as they spew air, mucus and other gases out of their blowholes. The helicopters are covered in petri dishes which collect samples of the slimy, gooey, gaseous emissions which can then be used to test the health of individual whales and overall whale populations.
The technique was designed by Dr. Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Zoological Society of London. In an article in the Telegraph , she explains, "Scientists have always found it difficult to study diseases in whales because…