50-year-old discovery in Aussie museum sparks surprising whale theory
Little is known about the rare creatures pulled from the blowhole of a beached whale in 1973.
A rare parasite could offer a clue behind a spate of mysterious strandings of pilot whales. Researchers from Australia believe when the long, slimy, nematodes lodge themselves inside the blowhole it affects the host’s behaviour.
“Imagine you have thousands of these objects, each of them three to five centimetres long, sitting in that blow hole and just clogging it,” Professor Shokoofeh Shamsi told Yahoo News.
The Charles Sturt University parasite expert and her colleague Dr Diane Barton have developed a theory that the infection in their blowholes could be disrupting the ability of pilot whales to navigate and communicate.
Their investigation was sparked after a vial of unidentified nematodes was rediscovered in the archives of a Tasmanian museum, which were originally scraped from the blowhole of a beached pilot whale more than 50 years ago. The outcome of that research has been published in the Journal of Diseases of Aquatic Organisms this month.
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It’s common for beached whales to be infected with parasites. Sea lice are the most commonly detected because they crawl out from crevices in the whale’s body when it slows down due to sickness. But it’s rare for a beached whale’s blowhole to be fully investigated for parasites.
The nematodes are the only parasites reported to infect the short-finned pilot whale. But the species had been poorly described in Australia, and very little is known of their presence here. The team were able to use advancements in technology to create a detailed re-description of the samples which had been stored in Launceston at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery.
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Parasites known to impact thoughts of humans and other animals
Shamsi hopes the publication of the Charles Sturt University paper will lead to more investigation of how this parasite could be affecting whales. She believes the research raises questions about the impact of marine parasites in Tasmania where there are high numbers of pilot whale strandings, but her find could also have global implications.
She has investigated a variety of other parasites, including toxoplasmosis which causes humans to engage in more risky behaviour. That infection is spread by cats, who in turn catch it from mice.
Other examples of parasites are common in popular media and television. Those of us who watched the The Last of Us series saw how a fungus could theoretically turn a human being into a zombie.
In real life, the larvae of parasitic wasps do actually eat the flesh of their host spiders, while simultaneously controlling their minds. And last year the discovery of a worm inside an Australian woman’s brain made international news.
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