Develop newly discovered nerve in the mouths of the great whales it can almost doubled in length and back like a rubber rope. These elastic nerves could explain how whales are able to eat by mouth of the globe during the dive.
The researchers found that surprisingly resilient nerves after collecting samples from a station commercial whaling in Iceland.
"This discovery was completely unexpected and unlike other neural structures in vertebrates us who have seen of a fixed length," said Wayne Vogl, Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of British Columbia in Canada.
Minke whales the largest group of baleen whales, tipping the scales at 40-80 tons. They feed on the mouth of the globe, capturing prey and water then filtering slowly through your call beards. The volume of water brought by a train may even exceed the size of Wales.
They are "unsurpassed by any vertebrate is still alive," said study co-author Nicholas Pyenson, curator of fossil marine mammals at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian in Washington, DC "It really is a very interesting question, as soon as Animals get you this scale, how this really gets nervous system upright "?
The findings may also shed light on huge extinct animals such as dinosaurs, according to researchers.
But much of minke whales remains a mystery. The distance in the ocean waters which makes it extremely difficult to study them. Occasionally, scientists get their hands on the whales, which have been on the beach, but then you probably already decayed tissue, Pyenson said. Even whales in captivity are less than ideal. More often than not, these whales are healthy and not a typical example.
"They live 99 percent of their lives away from the tools of human research," said Pyenson Live Science. "So the question is: How are we going to be able to be learning more about them?"
Vogl, Pyenson and his colleagues had a unique opportunity to lose one of the last station of whaling in Iceland. There tissue samples (less than 24 hours old) were to collect a dozen whales from the harpoon. "With every channel we investigate, we find something new," Pyenson said.
When researchers first whales seemed gigantic nerve, no one was sure what he or she looked. Due to its ductility, he saw the nerves of blood vessels at first. In fact, it took years of research of the samples under a microscope before the puzzle finally came together.
Next, the team plans to look at animals genetically fin whales and other animals of similar size. Pyenson neck also particularly interested in the study and long-tailed dinosaurs, known as sauropods. He hopes that a better understanding of the nervous system in the huge whales light on how the nervous one sauropods have shed dripped from his chest, over his 50 meters long (15 meters) from the neck to the head.
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