SitNews - Stories in the News - Ketchikan, Alaska

These gigantic whales have nerves like bungee cords

 

May 05, 2015
Tuesday PM


(SitNews) - Nerves aren't known for being stretchy. In fact, "nerve stretch injury" is a common form of trauma in humans. But University of British Columbia (UBC) researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on May 4 have discovered that nerves in the mouths and tongues of rorqual whales can more than double their length with no trouble at all.

"These large nerves actually stretch and recoil like bungee cords," says A. Wayne Vogl of the University of British Columbia. "This is unlike other nerves in vertebrates, where the nerve is of a more fixed length that has enough slack in it to accommodate changes in position of the structures the nerves are supplying."


jpg These gigantic whales have nerves like bungee cords

To eat, rorqual whales open their mouths and lunge while their tongues invert and their mouths fill like giant water balloons full of floating prey. The whales' nerves are stretchy so they can withstand the tissue deformation.
CREDIT: Vogl et al./Current Biology 2015


Those stretchy nerves support the animals' unique and extreme lunge feeding strategy, which helps to support the whales' gigantic bodies.

Rorqual whales represent the largest group among baleen whales, weighing in at an impressive 40 to 80 tons. 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 says. "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."

Vogl and his team hadn't expected this at all. They made the discovery after a member of the lab picked up a dull white cord-like structure and stretched it. Vogl recalls him saying something like, "Wow, look at this."

It looked like a blood vessel, which ought to be stretchy. But they realized upon closer inspection that it was a nerve -- one unlike any they'd ever seen before. The nerves of other species are generally surrounded by a thin collagen wall, and any stretch can pull and damage the nerves.

"Our next step is to get a better understanding of how the nerve core is folded to allow its rapid unpacking and re-packing during the feeding process," says UBC zoologist Robert Shadwick.

What the researchers see in these whales is something entirely different. The nerve fibers themselves are packaged inside a central core; they don't stretch so much as unfold. A very thick and stretchy outer wall full of elastin fibers that Vogl likens to elastic bands surrounds that nerve core.

The researchers don't know yet whether anything similar will turn up in other animals -- the ballooning throats of frogs, for example, or the long and fast tongues of chameleons. They plan to keep studying the whales' nerves in greater detail, in hopes of understanding better how the nerve core is folded in such a way to allow its rapid unpacking and re-packing as the entire structure is stretched and then relaxed again.

"This discovery underscores how little we know about even the basic anatomy of the largest animals alive in the oceans today," says Nick Pyenson, a former UBC postdoctoral researcher currently at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. "Our findings add to the growing list of evolutionary solutions that whales evolved in response to new challenges faced in marine environments over millions of years."

 

Edited by Mary Kauffman, SitNews

 

On the Web:

Current Biology, Vogl et al.: "Stretchy nerves are an essential component of the extreme feeding mechanism of rorqual whales"

 

Source of News:

University of British Columbia
http://www.ubc.ca



Publish A Letter in SitNews

Contact the Editor

SitNews ©2015
Stories In The News
Ketchikan, Alaska

 Articles & photographs that appear in SitNews may be protected by copyright and may not be reprinted without written permission from and payment of any required fees to the proper sources.

E-mail your news & photos to editor@sitnews.us

Photographers choosing to submit photographs for publication to SitNews are in doing so granting their permission for publication and for archiving. SitNews does not sell photographs. All requests for purchasing a photograph will be emailed to the photographer.