Content
Skip to Main ContentAccessibility Help
Quirks and Quarks

Floating poop reveals secrets of whale evolution

A study of the bacteria in whale stool samples, recovered from the Bay of Fundy, reveals that whales use a herbivores digestive system to process otherwise indigestible crustacean shells.

Fecal samples reveal that whales herbivorous guts help them digest crustaceans

CBC Radio ·
A right whale in the Bay of Fundy. (Annabel Beichman)
Quirks and Quarks8:59Floating Poop Reveals Secrets Of Whale Evolution - 2016/06/25 - Pt. 3
Annabel Beichman, a Ph.D student at the University of California, Los Angeles, and her colleagues spent many days out at sea in the Bay of Fundy, searching out pods of right whales and then sieving smelly floating whale faeces from the water.  It was a dirty job, but only way to sample the bacteria from the living whales guts - their microbiome.  

And analysis of what bacteria were present and what they could do led to a surprising insight into how gigantic whales make such a successful living from eating tiny aquatic crustaceans.  They found that the whales, though now carnivorous, were using a suite of capabilities evolved when their ancestors were terrestrial plant-eaters.

They were using these systems, evolved to break down difficult to digest plant material, to break down the hard exoskeletons of their shrimp-like prey - material ordinarily discarded by most predators. This likely means the whales get about 10% more calories from their food than other animals get from the same diet - a bonus that likely helps explain how they grow so large.

Related Links

- Paper in Nature
- Harvard release
- Science News story
- Science magazine story

 

More from this episode