if you want to know if a whale is doing well, what should we do?
as the largest mammal on earth, whale stays in the ocean for a long time, and divers can hardly access it. Anatomy is not natural enough to get physical tissue. Love is never a reason for injury. However, whale will not be obedient to the health of human health, you can not capture it on board the compulsory physical examination - Whale also has the right to live freely, and this twisted melon experiment does not accurately reflect the reality. This is a thorny issue for people who care about the survival of whale.
biologists used the method of collecting physiological specimens. As a doctor uses blood extraction, urine test and other methods to test our health, the health of the animals can also be expressed in the condition of their blood and excrement. But for the whale living in the ocean, these remaining physiological specimens are hard to find, and are also easily polluted by seawater.
now most of our understanding of whale comes from the unfortunate whale that is disabled, imprisoned, or stranded - only such inconvenient whale, human beings can be approached and checked. But the treatment is far less than prevention. How to get the physiological data of whale in normal life has been plagued by biologists.
some zoologists have thought of collecting normal whale breath and nasal discharge. Drivers who drink driving can be sold in front of the alcohol meter, and the pathogens in the whale exhaled gas can also reveal the secrets of their body's safety. If you can measure alcohol in whale breath, you can retain the bacteria, fungi and viruses exhaled from it. This method sounds simple and easy to use, but how to catch whale breathing?
the simplest way is tracking. Let's follow whale up the two paddles and collect its nasal gas quickly when it breathes. That's what biologists like Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse of the Zoological Society of London do. They stick a few Petri dishes on a paddle (a long stick with a flat plate) and take this "weapon" to track whale in the California Bay. Whenever whale breathes, the paddle is quickly stretched out near the whale (10-30 centimeters), and the nose is collected in a Petri dish by the east wind to be tested for the later laboratory. It costs less than 50 dollars in total.
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they succeeded in harvesting some of the big whale's runny nose mixture, but this is not good for small whale and some dolphins. Because of its small size, the liquid and gas-solid mixture exhaled by little whale is too close to the sea level. It often breaks up before reaching the Petri dish on the long stick. In addition, a small whale may not be strong enough to escape from fishing boats before leaving, leaving scientists with enthusiasm to do physical examination.
scientists beat their heads and came up with a good idea: Telecontrol aircraft.
they put a Petri dish on a toy helicopter and used a remote controller to command the aircraft to track whale. When the whale breathes, the plane dives down, and the sample is collected in a Petri dish under the fuselage, and then it rises quickly before the wave is swept, and comes back full. This method is very effective. Acevedo-Whitehouse and her colleagues obtained 22 samples in 8 whale and dolphins and successfully detected three bacteria for 5 whale, one of which has been proved to be very harmful to the health of whale. The
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[/url:8oo5bkmk] remote control aircraft method also has its shortcomings. Scientists need to change a large ship to set off the runway used for the take-off and descent of the remote control aircraft. They need a well-trained aircraft remote controller. If the sea breeze is too big, the grass root toy airplane will be blown away in the wind, so that it can not work. In addition, the price of this advanced toy is $1600, or a little expensive,
but this does not prevent Acevedo-Whitehouse and others from winning the 2010 Nobel prize for the fun, in recognition of their "successful use of remote control helicopters to collect whale nose." In an interview with BBC, Acevedo-Whitehouse said, "it's very important to recognize and make the public accept science." "The experimental results we finally obtained are very interesting, and it is also very interesting to do our whale nose test."