![]() If you look at a map of shipping traffic, the main shipping artery through the Indian Ocean goes right along the south coast of Sri Lanka. Most blue whales are highly migratory, but in Sri Lanka we’ve seen poop piles throughout the year - which means there’s a blue whale population here throughout the year, hanging out in a part of the world where the risk to them is extremely high. Nutrients that support all the little things, like phytoplankton - the microscopic plant-like organisms that are the base of the food web in the ocean, and also a source of oxygen for all of us. In doing this, they’re releasing all of those nutrients into the surface waters. In general, whales dive down deep to feed, where there’s iron and other nutrients that you don’t find very much of at the surface, and then they come up to the surface to breathe. Blue whales have black baleen so if I dig through and see short black baleen, I can be reasonably sure that it came out of a blue whale. Lastly, when you dig through poop you find pieces of baleen in it - and different species of whales have different colored baleen. The second thing it tells me is that they’re feeding in those waters, which is cool. It only floats on the surface for a short while before it disperses - so, first if I see a pile of whale poop, I know that there’s a whale close by. There are three kinds of information we get from whale poop. It makes you mesmerized, makes you willing to pick it up. Maybe it’s the color, this beautiful red from the tiny, shrimp-like creatures the whales eat. It’s not that it doesn’t smell - it’s definitely got a funky stench to it, kind of like old fish. Is it feeding here?” That’s where my quest began. ![]() I was like, “Wait a second … why is this animal pooping here. Like, “what the heck are they doing?”Īnd then one of them pooped. And then we got closer - and they weren’t mating. Here's HowĪs we approached, I was just thinking, “This is going to be awesome!” No one had ever documented blue whales breeding before. To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist. “My parents just said, ‘Do what you love and you’ll do it well,’” she says. I wanted to be the one who discovered things and saw things that no one else saw, explore places no one else would go.”Īfter becoming the first Sri Lankan to get a PhD in marine mammal research, de Vos has become a pioneer in the study of blue whales, making discoveries that have been recognized across the globe. But “as a child I wanted to be an adventure scientist. “Most people are encouraged to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, or business people,” she says. After repeatedly coming across blue whale poop at sea, she realized that the local population actually stays there year-round.įor a woman growing up in Sri Lanka, marine biology was one of the most unorthodox fields de Vos could have chosen. But blue whales are still a mysterious bunch - especially the ones near Sri Lanka, since no one studied that particular population until de Vos began to in 2008. While a student, de Vos was taught that all blue whales are migratory, feeding at the poles and coming to the warmer waters in order to breed and give birth. When de Vos found the red, gloopy stuff floating at the surface of the North Indian Ocean, it was her first clue that this population of whales behaves very differently than previously thought. Specifically, she’s stuck on kind that comes out of blue whales living off the coast of her homeland, Sri Lanka in fact you could even say she built her career on a pile of this shit. “I have an unhealthy - or, I would like to say, healthy - obsession with poop,” says marine biologist Asha de Vos.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |