Credit: Sally Mizroch/NOAA
A humpback whale breaching.
It’s not easy to do pregnancy tests on whales. You can’t just ask a wild ocean animal that’s the size of a school bus to pee on a little stick. For decades, the only way scientists could count pregnant females was by sight and best guesses based on visual characteristics. For the last several years, researchers have relied on hormone tests of blubber collected via darts, but the results were often inconclusive (not negative or positive), and researchers couldn’t confidently say if the animal was pregnant or just ovulating.
Research from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Australia’s Griffith University points to a weakness of that testing and provides a new method for hormone testing that offers better results.
“Previous tests only looked at progesterone in blubber samples,” said Ashley Boggs, a research biologist at NIST who helped to develop the new tests. “We found that androgens, and especially androstenedione in combination with progesterone, are much more likely to be a reliable marker of pregnancy.”
Being able to determine whale pregnancy is important because it offers insight into the health of a population. Whales are sensitive to changes in their environment and can serve as early warning signals that something is amiss, including details about the health of the food web, the impact of ocean noise, and the levels of contaminant exposures. The Marine Mammal Protection Act was enacted in 1972 to protect whales, and since that time stock assessments and protections have been carried out by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), including data on pregnancies. That’s why NOAA came to NIST to try to advance hormone measurement technology for marine mammals.
In rec ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
