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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>The
massive plugs contain spikes and dips of stress hormones that perfectly match
the history of modern whaling.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:18.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>The
History of the Oceans Is Locked in Whale Earwax<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='box-sizing: inherit;font-size:1.375rem;flex-basis: calc(100% - 0px);
letter-spacing:-0.01563rem'><span class=c-bylineauthor><span style='font-size:
12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";text-transform:uppercase'><a
href="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/ed-yong/"><span style='color:windowtext;
text-decoration:none'>ED YONG</span></a></span></span><span style='font-size:
12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";text-transform:uppercase'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>NOV
21, 2018<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/astonishing-history-locked-whale-earwax/576349/<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:22.3pt'><span style='font-size:15.0pt;
font-family:"Georgia","serif";color:black'><img border=0 width=32 height=32
id="_x0000_i1025" src="cid:image001.png@01D484BB.282B63B0"
alt="A humpback whale jumps out of the ocean"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:.2in;
margin-left:0in;line-height:22.3pt'><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:
"Arial","sans-serif";color:black'>Whales are big, whales are long-lived, and
whales have paddle-shaped flippers instead of dexterous hands. These three
traits inexorably lead to a fourth: Over time, whales accumulate a<span
class=apple-converted-space> </span><em><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>lot</span></em><span
class=apple-converted-space><i> </i></span>of earwax.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:.2in;
margin-left:0in;line-height:22.3pt;box-sizing: inherit'><span style='font-size:
11.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:black'>Whale earwax forms like
yours does: A gland secretes oily gunk into the ear canal, which hardens and
accumulates into a solid, tapering plug. In the largest whales, like blues, a
plug can grow up to 10 inches long, and looks like a cross between a goat’s
horn and the world’s nastiest candle. Fin whale wax is firmer than blue
whale wax, bowhead whale wax is softer and almost liquid, and sei whale wax is
dark and brittle. But regardless of size or texture, these plugs are all
surprisingly informative.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='margin:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:22.3pt;box-sizing: inherit'><span
style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:black'>As whales
go through their annual cycles of summer binge-eating and winter migrations,
the wax in their ears changes from light to dark. These changes manifest as
alternating bands, which you can see if you slice through the plugs. Much as
with tree rings, you can count the bands to estimate a whale’s age. And
you can also analyze them to measure the substances that were coursing through
the whale’s body when each band was formed. A whale’s earwax, then,
is a chronological chemical biography.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='margin:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:22.3pt'><span
style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:.2in;
margin-left:0in;line-height:22.3pt'><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:
"Arial","sans-serif";color:black'><a
href="https://www.baylor.edu/biology/index.php?id=68808"><span
style='color:black'>Stephen Trumble</span></a><span
class=apple-converted-space> </span>and<span class=apple-converted-space> </span><a
href="https://www.baylor.edu/environmentalscience/index.php?id=954203"><span
style='color:black'>Sascha Usenko</span></a><span class=apple-converted-space> </span>from
Baylor University have worked out how to read those biographies.<span
class=apple-converted-space> </span><a
href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07044-w"><span
style='color:black'>And they’ve shown</span></a><span
class=apple-converted-space> </span>that whale earwax not only reveals the
lives of their owners, but the history of the oceans. Hunting, abnormal
temperatures, pollutants—it’s all there. If all of humanity’s
archives were to disappear, Trumble and Usenko could still reconstruct a pretty
decent record of whaling intensity by measuring the stress hormones in the
earwax of a few dozen whales.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:22.3pt'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";
color:black'>The duo first tested their idea of studying earwax by<span
class=apple-converted-space> </span><a
href="http://www.pnas.org/content/110/42/16922"><span style='color:black'>analyzing
the plug</span></a><span class=apple-converted-space> </span>from a single
blue whale—a 12-year-old male that was fatally struck by a ship off the
coast of Santa Barbara in 2007. They could tell that the whale became sexually
mature when it was 9 years old, as that’s when testosterone levels in the
plug shot up by 200 times. They showed that the stress hormone cortisol peaked
a year before that, perhaps a sign of the creature’s changing body and
mind. They found traces of pesticides and flame retardants that were especially
concentrated in the whale’s first six months of life, and had likely been
passed down in its mother’s milk. “I was surprised at how well [the
technique] worked, not only for persistent chemicals but for hormones that
typically rapidly degrade,” Usenko<span class=apple-converted-space> </span><a
href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2013/09/16/biography-of-a-blue-whale-told-through-ear-wax/"><span
style='color:black'>told me at the time</span></a>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:22.3pt'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";
color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:.2in;
margin-left:0in;line-height:22.3pt;box-sizing: inherit'
id=injected-recirculation-link-1><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:
"Arial","sans-serif";color:black'>That was just one earwax plug, but it was
surprisingly easy to get more. They just had to call curators at the right
natural-history museums. “Museums are notorious for collecting
everything, and waiting for the science to catch up,” Trumble says.
“We called <a
href="http://vertebrates.si.edu/mammals/mammals_staff_pages/potter_charles.cfm"><span
style='color:black'>Charles Potter</span></a><span class=apple-converted-space> </span>at
the Smithsonian Institution, and he said, ‘It’s interesting you
called because we have pallets and pallets of these ear plugs sitting around,
and we’re thinking of throwing them away.’ Instead of being thrown
away, those ear plugs are now objects of wonder.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:.2in;
margin-left:0in;line-height:22.3pt;box-sizing: inherit'><span style='font-size:
11.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:black'>Trumble, Usenko, and their
colleagues ended up measuring cortisol levels in the plugs from 20 blue, fin,
and humpback whales, the oldest of which had been born in 1871. The team
measured how this stress hormone varied over the lifetime of each animal,
relative to the lowest levels found in each plug. They then combined these
readings into a 146-year chronicle of whale stress, which they compared to a
record of all whaling data from the 20th century. “We plotted the two
together, and were like: ‘You’ve got to be kidding
me,’” says Trumble.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='margin:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:22.3pt'><span
style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:black'>The two
data sets matched beautifully. When whaling increased, cortisol levels rose,
hitting their peak during the heyday of whaling in the early 1960s. After
moratoriums were adopted in the 1970s, whaling harvests fell by 7.5 percent a
year and cortisol levels in earwax fell by 6.4 percent a year.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:.2in;
margin-left:0in;line-height:22.3pt;box-sizing: inherit'><span style='font-size:
11.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:black'>To an extent, that’s
not surprising: Of course, whales would be more stressed if their pod-mates are
being harvested. Still, it’s astonishing just<span
class=apple-converted-space> </span><em><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>how
well</span></em><span class=apple-converted-space> </span>the two data
sets match. Trumble and Usenko could get a pretty good picture of<span
class=apple-converted-space> </span><em><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>global</span></em><span
class=apple-converted-space><i> </i></span>whaling efforts through the
lived experiences of 20 whales.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:.2in;
margin-left:0in;line-height:22.3pt;box-sizing: inherit'><span style='font-size:
11.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:black'>There are a few
discrepancies, and they’re telling. For example, whaling fell away during
World War II while cortisol levels rose by 10 percent. The oceans may have been
relatively free of harpoons, but they were instead filled with battleships,
submarines, depth charges, and the sounds of warfare. Those indirect
disturbances, it seems, were just as stressful to the whales as their hunters
had been—and they continue today.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:.2in;
margin-left:0in;line-height:22.3pt;box-sizing: inherit'><span style='font-size:
11.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:black'>Since the 1970s, whaling
has dwindled to negligible levels in the Northern Hemisphere, but if anything,
cortisol levels have risen—slowly at first, and then more dramatically in
recent decades. Trumble and Usenko showed that this rise correlates with the
number of days when ocean temperatures were unusually high.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:.2in;
margin-left:0in;line-height:22.3pt;box-sizing: inherit'><span style='font-size:
11.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:black'>The team’s 146-year
chronicle also has a gigantic spike in the early 2000s when cortisol levels
seem to shoot through the roof. That’s because of the very first blue whale
they studied. It was the only individual whose life spanned those particular
years, and for whatever reason, it spent those years in an extreme state of
stress. Was it reacting to the noisy shipping lanes that crisscross
California’s waters? Was it suffering from the mercury, pesticides, and
other pollutants in its body? No one knows, but its cortisol was hitting highs
that haven’t been seen since the days when people killed whales in the
hundreds of thousands. “When I look at that, I think: Here’s an individual
that’s under stress levels as if it’s being whaled,” says
Usenko.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:.2in;
margin-left:0in;line-height:22.3pt;box-sizing: inherit'><span style='font-size:
11.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:black'>“I think this is
going to revolutionize our studies of whale biology,” says Kathleen Hunt
from Northern Arizona University, who was not involved in the work.
“Whale biologists are used to gleaning tiny bits of information from
samples like a single blubber biopsy, one or two fecal samples, or a few
photographs scattered over years. An earwax plug is more like 200 samples in a
row, taken from the same animal, every 6 months, for its whole life.”
They’re like the ice cores that climate scientists use to peer back into
the Earth’s distant past.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:.2in;
margin-left:0in;line-height:22.3pt;box-sizing: inherit'><span style='font-size:
11.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:black'>The plugs are especially
informative because whales are so long-lived. They can take a decade to mature,
go for years between pregnancies, and spend much longer recovering from
episodes of trauma. “We’ve never really had a way to track
individual whale stress responses over those sorts of timescale before, and
it’s very exciting,” says Hunt.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:.2in;
margin-left:0in;line-height:22.3pt;box-sizing: inherit'><span style='font-size:
11.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:black'>The team is now examining
the wax for pregnancy hormones, chemical isotopes that reflect the
whales’ diet, and other telltale molecules. “We’re getting
tons and tons of data from these earplugs that we’ve only ever
assumed,” Trumble says. And he’s not running out of material to
work with. “The Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa has 4,000 ear plugs,
and we had 100 shipped to us. We’re getting quite deep into this.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='margin:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:22.3pt'><span
style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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