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New Findings On Whale Tongues May Lead To Insight On Human Nerve Damage

Posted by samzenpus on from the bend-me-shape-me dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this story about the discovery of stretchy nerves in whales. Drawing from the Globe & Mail's story: Researchers from the University of British Columbia have discovered that the largest animals alive – whales – have nerves in their tongues that can double in length and then recoil like a bungee cord. The researchers were studying specimens at a commercial whaling station in Iceland when they stumbled upon the discovery reported Monday in Current Biology. Researchers say it could have important implications for study into human nerve damage. "I had never seen a nerve like that," said Wayne Vogl, of UBC's Cellular and Physiological Sciences department.

47 comments

  1. Hmmm Tasty Whale Tongue by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Better than bull testicles.

    1. Re:Hmmm Tasty Whale Tongue by Feral+Nerd · · Score: 1

      Better than bull testicles.

      Beer made from smoked whale testicles: http://www.i-m.mx/velasala/bru... The web page is written in such bad English that the spelling nazis will suffer a stroke from reading it but I assure you this is no hoax.

    2. Re:Hmmm Tasty Whale Tongue by Rei · · Score: 1

      Oh god, it's rare to see such bad English here. Maybe they got my ex's brother to write that page ;) And can they not tell the difference between their accent and apostrophe keys? Also, what stupid stereotyping-about-Iceland-to-market-to-foreigners is this? Just letting people know: almost everyone here thinks this is an absurd product.

      --
      Sigur RÃs: I didn't know that Heaven had a rock band.
    3. Re:Hmmm Tasty Whale Tongue by gstoddart · · Score: 1

      Well, honestly though, how's your Icelandic? And do you know for a fact that their apostrophes and their accents are different?

      I have certainly heard about some Icelandic 'delicacies' of some rotted/fermented fish which has a very ammonia flavor which nobody but Icelanders will eat.

      You may think it's an absurd product, but I'm betting some guy in Iceland is going "mmmm ... smoked whale ball beer".

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    4. Re:Hmmm Tasty Whale Tongue by I'm+New+Around+Here · · Score: 1

      Pretty sure when he said, "almost everyone here thinks ...", he is referring to his fellow Icelanders.

      --
      If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
    5. Re:Hmmm Tasty Whale Tongue by Rei · · Score: 1

      Amm var (th)að ekki augljóst að ég bý á Íslandi (th)egar ég skrifaði orðið "here"? Og meira að segja fólk borða hákarl ekki oft. Og ég er meira að segja grænmetisæta.

      Reyndu að lesa betur. ;)

      --
      Sigur RÃs: I didn't know that Heaven had a rock band.
    6. Re:Hmmm Tasty Whale Tongue by gstoddart · · Score: 1

      LOL, nei, þaà var ekki augljÃst aà "hér" þýddi Ãsland og aà þà værir Ãslensk.

      En þÃkk sé Google Translate, get ég lÃta Ãt eins og hÃlfviti à tveimur tungumÃlum. Ef gert er rÃà auÃvitaà Slash dot er ekki flak Unicode. ;-)

      In which case I'll look even more the moron. :-P

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    7. Re:Hmmm Tasty Whale Tongue by Rei · · Score: 1

      I'll reiterate: People here think it's a ridiculous product. The page is stupid marketing to foreigners. Yes, there are separate accent and apostrophe keys (in case you're curious, here's what an Icelandic keyboard layout looks like). Hákarl (the fermented shark you refer to) isn't eaten commonly, it's actually fairly rarely eaten (though some people do like it). Most of the foods you'd consider weird are rarely consumed, like sheep heads, skate, etc, often associated with a particular festival or whatnot. Probably the only things you'd find weird that are eaten fairly commonly are horse and fish jerky (harðfiskur). Lamb is commonly eaten here but you probably wouldn't find that weird. We also have a lot of dairy products you don't have but I don't think you'd find most of them that weird. Anyway, probably the most commonly-eaten food here is pizza ;) Hamburgers and hotdogs are common too (though our hotdogs are made of lamb).

      Whale is eaten here but rarely. Nearly half of the catch consumed in Iceland is eaten by tourists (a large percentage of which, I should add, come from America). Also I'm continually surprised by the percentage of Americans who criticize Iceland for whaling but don't know that America whales too, and no small amount (producing thousands of tonnes of whale meat per year). Yes, they're "natives" whaling, but 1) it's no less traditional for Icelanders to whale than it is for Alaskan natives, 2) Alaskan natives use modern equipment for whaling too, including chasing them down in speedboats, killing them with modern equipment, and dragging them on shore with backhoes; and 3) Alaskan whales end up no less dead than Icelandic ones. None of the Icelandic whale populations are threatened.

      Anyone who wants to discourage whaling over here, a few tips.

      One, don't come out with the self-righteous stuff, because it doesn't fly. Not only does the US whale too, but receiving lectures on morality from a country where a majority of the population supports torture and who engages in all sorts of obscene human rights abuses and whose domestic livestock are mostly raised in factory farms in horrible conditions doesn't exactly come across well.

      Secondly, know that any overt pressure is just going to cause backlash, and the more overt, the more the backlash. Many of you may see for example Paul Watson as a hero. Here he's seen as a ecoterrorist; he literally sent people in to sink ships right in the public harbour. If you want to be taken seriously, you need to distance yourself from these sort of people. You don't make friends by talking up people who come in and wreck up the place.

      Third, understand the local perspective. It's not only that they've been eaten traditionally since Iceland was settled (indeed, the word for "beached whale" also means "jackpot" or "godsend", because in the old days it could mean the difference between life or death for a whole town). It's that they live free out in the open ocean, growing up their whole lives unhindered by man (except when, say, a NATO ship uses a super-powerful anti-sub sonar in the area or whatnot :P), living a pretty much idyllic life - and a single whale provides a vast amount of meat. Meanwhile, pigs for example - also highly intelligent animals - grow up in horrible squalid conditions in many of the countries that criticize Iceland .

      Fourth, there are actual arguments you can make that have effect, and have on their own been discouraging whale consumption - but which foreigners who oppose whaling rarely make. Probably the foremost of these is the health issue. Whales, being top predators, tend to have dangerously high levels of heavy metal and organic pollutant contamination. If you want to make someone feel uncomfortable about eating whale meat, point out how much mercury and lead they're eating in that serving. There are also lesser arguments you can make that may or ma

      --
      Sigur RÃs: I didn't know that Heaven had a rock band.
    8. Re:Hmmm Tasty Whale Tongue by Rei · · Score: 1

      What on Earth was that? I can make out portions of what you wrote through the mangled bits but not all of it.

      --
      Sigur RÃs: I didn't know that Heaven had a rock band.
    9. Re:Hmmm Tasty Whale Tongue by Rei · · Score: 1

      If you want to write in Icelandic here, the only letter you need to swap out to prevent Slashdot from mangling it is thorn, just write it as TH or something.

      Hmm, quick test... áéíóúöæðÁÉÍÓÚÖÆÐ - everything but the thorns should be in there.

      --
      Sigur RÃs: I didn't know that Heaven had a rock band.
    10. Re:Hmmm Tasty Whale Tongue by gstoddart · · Score: 1

      Yeah, sorry about that, it was an attempt to use google translate for:

      "LOL, no, it wasn't obvious that 'here' meant Iceland and that you were Icelandic.

      But thanks to Google Translate, I can look like an idiot in two languages. Assuming of course Slash dot doesn't wreck the unicode. ;-)"

      How the hell do you get the accents to work? As your signature points out, Slashdot's support for unicode is pathetic.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    11. Re:Hmmm Tasty Whale Tongue by Rei · · Score: 1

      Were you trying to say:

      "LOL, nei, (th)að var ekki augljóst að "here" ((væri?)) Ísland og að (th)ú værir íslensk. En ((??????)) Google Translate get ég látið eins og hálfviti á tveimur tungumálum. Ef gert er ráð fyrir auðvitað að Slashdot ((sé ekki að flækja Unicodeið?))"

      That is:

      "LOL, no, it wasn't clear that here is Iceland and that you were were Icelandic. But (????) Google Translate I can come across like an idiot in two languages. If one assumes of course that Slashdot isn't screwing up the Unicode"?

      --
      Sigur RÃs: I didn't know that Heaven had a rock band.
  2. Very Interesting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    New excuse for Japan to continue whaling, but could be great for health research.

    1. Re: Very Interesting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That was my first thought. Derive value from other species other than the value of driving them to extinction...? Nonsense!!

    2. Re:Very Interesting by mrxak · · Score: 1

      This is obviously a story about Icelandic whaling. The Japanese aren't the only ones conducting marine biology research on whales.

      --
      -mrxak
      Onions Will Kill You
    3. Re:Very Interesting by Rei · · Score: 1

      This is obviously a story about Icelandic whaling.

      What's wrong with Icelandic whaling?

      (Also, I don't know how to spell ;) )

      --
      Sigur RÃs: I didn't know that Heaven had a rock band.
  3. What a load of bollocks. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "Oh, look, something about nerves. WE have nerves! We have PROBLEMS with our nerves breaking down! We can claim that this issue can have something to do with OUR nerves! We'll get a press report! Whoopeee!"

    That's pretty much what went on in their heads (or someone's head, the moron who decided to make the press release).

    Seriously. It's interesting. But it's got as much to do with us as amoebas do.

    1. Re:What a load of bollocks. by Rei · · Score: 1

      They calls them like they sees them. They're whale biologists.

      (And the fifth reason whales kill is for the sheer fun of it. )

      --
      Sigur RÃs: I didn't know that Heaven had a rock band.
    2. Re:What a load of bollocks. by Daemonic · · Score: 1

      Yup. The important inner nervy bits (technical term) weren't so much stretchy like elastic, more stretchy like a spring.

      TFA - "What the whale has developed is a beautiful system to protect its nerves, to package it in a way, probably in a corkscrew or undulated way, surrounded by elastin fibres"

      So we could avoid nerve damage by preemptively replacing our at-risk nerves with stretchy whale nerves, in much the same way we could avoid bone breakage by covering our skeleton with adamantium... or some non-fictional alternative.

  4. Japan needs more whale meat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    I think Japan has found a reason to harvest more whales.

    1. Re:Japan needs more whale meat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      whale tongue sushi?

    2. Re:Japan needs more whale meat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      First thought was: what have they been doing for "research".?
      All these years without any breakthroughs.

  5. How to start online casino? by MuhammadKashif · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Each and every thing you need to know about online casino es. Its necessary for all the people to know each and every rule of casino. Each and every thing is present in this video for playing online casinoes games. http://bit.ly/1E3jntx

  6. Why the fuck is mobile browsing so bad? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

    Why the fuck is mobile browsing so god damn unstable and buggy and bloated and slow as hell. I think everyday I want to take my modern smartphone and throw it onto cement. Seriously, browsing the web 20 years ago was WAY more functional. What the fuck is wrong with "designers" today?

    1. Re:Why the fuck is mobile browsing so bad? by Rei · · Score: 1

      Ah, the good old days of the web as it was in 1995? (*boggle*)

      Have you set your browser to identify as a desktop browser?

      --
      Sigur RÃs: I didn't know that Heaven had a rock band.
    2. Re: Why the fuck is mobile browsing so bad? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Doing this barely works anymore. Literally the web starting going to shit in a whole new way in 2007 when the iPhone came out. Take trying to read news online for example. The page loads super slow as 10000 lines of superfluous JavaScript code gets executed and 20 ad servers are queried. Then comes the top menu which is fucking useless. Then comes the oversized text so I can read maybe 3 or 4 lines on a page. Then comes the pop up overlay email squeeze page. Gotta tap the X ten times before it registers a tap and goes away. Then I scroll the text and up loads an image from some ad server and the text shifts making me click on a link instead of scrolling down so I gotta press the back button and load the page all over again. Then when I finally can scroll the page up come the native browser top and bottom menus so I can see maybe 2 or 3 lines constantly shifting. It's such a shit fuck failure. The mobile web today is a design abomination. --OP, still pissed.

    3. Re:Why the fuck is mobile browsing so bad? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Setting the user agent does nothing if the website is using CSS/javascript to alter the page.
      Responsive design is shit.

    4. Re: Why the fuck is mobile browsing so bad? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And what's better? A bloated desktop site that takes even longer to load and you have to scroll all over the fucking place and then pinch to zoom in and out when you want to navigate? Having to download an app (that 99% of the time is just a wrapper for the mobile site) for every fucking website I want to visit so that the app can steal all my private info like my contacts and phone records?

      Mobile web sites aren't always the greatest, and the interfaces could use some improvements, but they are better than the other options when you're on the go. If you need the full site, use a PC.

    5. Re:Why the fuck is mobile browsing so bad? by sjames · · Score: 1

      Bad designers think their design is far far more important than the information they are supposed to present, so they get fanatic about preventing even a single pixel being displaced, especially at the explicit request of the unsophisticated swine reading the page.

    6. Re: Why the fuck is mobile browsing so bad? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Can 2nd that. Responsive completely sucks.

    7. Re: Why the fuck is mobile browsing so bad? by Gr8Apes · · Score: 1

      What does any of that have to do with an iPhone? Web page bloat is what it is, and has nothing to do with the devices used to view them.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    8. Re:Why the fuck is mobile browsing so bad? by Gr8Apes · · Score: 1

      The funny thing is that the original intent of HTML was to allow the end user to format the page as it saw fit, since the web page author could not know the details of the display size. The web page designers are trying to hammer a screw.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    9. Re: Why the fuck is mobile browsing so bad? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because people are attempting to make web pages as "nice" as a native app on an iPhone. Many js libraries now help make web pages more like native apps that there is very little you can do with a native app that you can't with an html page. In addition the html page works on multiple devices.

      Kind of like java, write once suck everywhere.

    10. Re:Why the fuck is mobile browsing so bad? by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 1

      The mobile implementation of Slashdot itself is bad enough. Don't blame the limited screen space on your phone, either, because the tablet experience is even worse: slow, jerky and you have to re-enter your login every pea-pickin' time.

    11. Re:Why the fuck is mobile browsing so bad? by gstoddart · · Score: 1

      Yeah, no kidding. I can't tell you how many web pages slavishly stick to their pre-defined widths because some hack of a designer thought it looked pretty.

      Which means you horizontally scroll on small screens, and on large screens you see acres of unused space.

      So much web design is utter crap ... but mobile browsing is utterly pointless. Because it turns into "here, let us forward you to a different link which doesn't have any actual content, won't show you the link you just followed, and has no mechanism to find the link you just followed."

      Honestly, I don't know why most places bother with a mobile version of their website if it's just going to be a steaming turd which doesn't show any useful information.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    12. Re:Why the fuck is mobile browsing so bad? by Gr8Apes · · Score: 1

      Even the 12 column adaptive design currently undertaken by many only works for certain styles of websites. In some cases, the content just doesn't morph well, in others it cannot. If "designers" would just let HTML be HTML and live within it, they'd be much better off. Sometimes a large page I can zoom and pan is perfectly fine.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    13. Re:Why the fuck is mobile browsing so bad? by sjames · · Score: 1

      Hear! Hear!

      That is exactly the problem with modern web design.

  7. Time to start torturing living whales then? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Just like the 'researchers' torture millions of animals every year, in the name of 'vital' research. Sure it's 'vital', vital to their careers...

    Why aren't we doing experiments on whales, since they are so much like humans? Oh, wait...
    NO animals are like humans, and all vivisection is therefore fraud.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvLwVmVF4PU

  8. That's no nerve... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That's no nerve....

  9. Sarcasm by ThatsNotPudding · · Score: 2

    Oh, I'm sure the Japanese 'whale scientists' have known about this for decades.

  10. Better link... by DoctorBonzo · · Score: 2

    ... with an actual picture of the nerve:

    http://news.ubc.ca/2015/05/04/gigantic-whales-have-stretchy-bungee-cord-nerves/

  11. Trousers. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I've had that in my trousers since birth.

  12. Never seen a nerve like that by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 1

    >> "I had never seen a nerve like that," said Wayne Vogl

    I'm guessing he doesn't spend much time with Japanese tentacle...

  13. Erectile tissue? by rizole · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I reckon the average penis must at least double in length when erect so do the nerves in there do? An elephant penis can grow to 6 1/2 foot long! And while I think on, what about nerves in frog or bird vocal sacs? Chameleon's tongue? Hyper-elastic skin conditions?

    1. Re:Erectile tissue? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      As someone with a hyper-elastic skin condition (Ehlers Danlos Syndrome) let me tell you that the nerves themselves can stretch to a point, but nerve damage is common. The condition affects collagen making it more flexible and stretchy than it should be and as I understand it nerves contain collagen as well

  14. Nice! by nospam007 · · Score: 1

    Seems like they licked it.

  15. The Only Suitable Whales Existed in 1986 by TonyXL · · Score: 1

    We'll have to go back in time to get them.