New Species of Whale Discovered

dlesko writes: "Scientists have discovered a new species of whale, a startling find made through DNA analysis of some of the marine mammals that washed ashore in California over the past three decades."

Comments

Here be whales.

[Perdo]

Where be my harpoon?

That night, in the mid-watch, when the old man - as his wont at intervals - stepped forth from the scuttle in which he leaned, and went to his pivot-hole, he suddenly thrust out his face fiercely, snuffing up the sea air as a sagacious ship's dog will, in drawing nigh to some barbarous isle. He declared that a whale must be near. Soon that peculiar odor, sometimes to a great distance given forth by the living sperm whale, was palpable to all the watch; nor was any mariner surprised when, after inspecting the compass, and then the dog-vane, and then ascertaining the precise bearing of the odor as nearly as possible, Ahab rapidly ordered the ship's course to be slightly altered, and the sail to be shortened.

The acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently vindicated at daybreak, by the sight of a long sleek on the sea directly and lengthwise ahead, smooth as oil, and resembling in the pleated watery wrinkles bordering it, the polished metallic-like marks of some swift tide- rip, at the mouth of a deep, rapid stream.

"Man the mast-heads! Call all hands

strange reporting

[rjamestaylor]

Why is it that a story about a new species of whale does not tell us what the new species' name is, what the similar species name is or what factors of the DNA distinguish the two from each other, yet we're treated to a number of sentences about "even off the coast of California" we don't know everything, and "even from these big animals everyone loves" we don't know everything.

It's funny; I started out reading the article to find out something I didn't know and instead was told something I already knew - that I don't know everything.

It's enough to make me swear off popular reporting of scientific stories.

Re:strange reporting

[nucal]

Boy, that story was wafer-thin.

This is an abstract of what looks like a comparable study done with dolphins. Most of the original classification of species was done using fairly gross comparisons - almost to the level of "are they basically the same shape?" (sympatric morphotypes). What Heyning's group is doing is to compare the DNA sequence of a elements from a mitochondrial gene, cytochrome b, isolated from different dolphins or whales. Mitochondrial DNA is unique, in that it does not mix with nuclear DNA and is only transmitted to offspring from the mother, not the father. This means that since different species do not interbreed, species specific differences in mitochondrial DNA sequences will be more pronounced than in the more "typical" gene sequence. By grouping individual animals by mitochondrial DNA sequences, they can then use this to go back and identify subtle differences in physiology that you otherwise couldn't do with the small subpopulation of beached whales.

A similar approach has been used to analyze human evolution, among other things.