Do whales poop?

The great thing about biology (which I'm using here in a broad sense that includes the various branches of ecology) is that you get permission to talk openly about all kinds of stuff that otherwise makes everyone get all giggly and weird. Like sex--ever notice this? Turn on a nature documentary, and more often than not, sooner or later you'll see some sex. Granted none of it's human, but still, you've gotta kinda wonder about these people. Or poop. Mostly it's only 12-year-olds and younger who get to talk about poop, but we were talking about poop in class just the other day. See, landscape ecology is all about how different kinds of places interact with each other; climb to the top of something really tall, say a big church steeple, and look out, what do you see? Maybe there's cropland and pasture and little red barns, maybe there's a whole lot of strip malls, maybe it's mostly forest, but in some shape or form you're looking at some kind of patchwork--a landscape that owes its identity to the pattern of patchwork you can see from your tower. But what does it mean? What is that pattern, that identity?

You can look at anything you like and think all sorts of things about it, but only some of those thoughts are going to do you or anyone else any good. Now, science isn't about the search for truth (that's religion's department, for better or worse) it's just a search for useful ways of thinking. It's like a map; a map isn't the truth, it's not the actual land, it's just a tool that's more or less useful. The useful map isn't usually the one that includes the most detail, it's the one that includes the right detail, the detail that makes the pattern jump out, that makes the muddle of the world make sense in a way you can use. If you're trying to get to New York, the detail you need is the network of roads. If you're trying to understand the ecology of certain agricultural landscapes, you need poop. In brief, poop is a major medium of communication between one part of the land and the next, a detail you need to track for the view from the tower to make sense. Which brings us to whales.

Since we, the class, were already talking about poop, it was a short conceptual hop from the poop of cows to the poop of whales, which someone had heard discussed on NPR; apparently whales, like cows, carry nutrients from one part of their world to another by eating here and pooping there; they constitute part of the language by which one place on land or sea communicates with another, communication that makes up the conversation that creates the pattern visible from the tower, whether steeple or lighthouse, bird's eye view whether from crow or gull. I remembered that a friend had been wondering about whale poop recently, and I figured I'd look up the NPR article and write a brilliant article all about landscape ecology and filled with witty little digressions and fascinating bits of scientific tid. As usual I got totally distracted, in this case by the comments posted to the article. I mean, it's interesting that a group of scientists found that by feeding at depth and pooping near the surface, whales fertilize the floating algae that forms the base layer of their own food chain. You can read the article here; http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130437080. But what's far more interesting is the series of comments posted on the article, which were mostly complaints about the rigor and importance of the research, challenges, in other words, to what kinds of questions should be asked, and how, and why.

Whys about whys; how could I resist?

So DO whales poop? Of course they poop, they're mammals; they eat, so they poop. According to the paper the NPR article was based on (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0013255), whale poop is sort of liquidy, and makes clouds several feet across that hang in the water for a while. The clouds are "visibly heterogeneous," meaning not the same all over--I imagine it swirling unevenly like underwater incense. It's the color of over-steeped green tea.

But this is something a lot of the comments focused on; just as I can say "of course whales poop," they said of course whale poop has at least some minimal fertilizing effect. The implication was that this didn't need to be studied. Now, friends, there may be many reasons not to study something, not least that there's always something else you could study, and how do you choose which to focus on? But "everybody knows this" is not one such reason. Because a lot of what everybody knows is wrong.

I'm sure you can think of a lot of examples yourself--people thinking the world is flat is the most obvious example, though one of questionable historical accuracy itself. One of the things science is good at, maybe the thing it is best at, is proving that things everybody assumes to be true aren't. And science isn't done yet...it's not even close. I used to think that science had pretty much covered all the easy stuff already, and that new discoveries were mostly happening in places that are difficult to study, like Mars, or inside the spleens of very rare aardvarks. Then I started seriously dipping into the Why River myself, and I realized that there's lots of stuff that just nobody has gotten around to yet. My teacher likes to tell the story of someone sent out to research the conservation status of one hundred threatened species living in the immediate vicinity of a major university, only to find that for 96 of those species, the data was either totally missing, or useless. I mean, these are some of the most convenient species to study in the world, practically in the backyard of a whole nest of researchers, and just nobody had gotten around to really studying more than four of them. With a record like that, there might be a whale that doesn't poop, and no one would know.


Scientists are kind of caught in a bind, if you think about it; if the study confirms expectations, people wonder why she bothered. If the study doesn't bear out the researcher's hypothesis, people think she failed. This is altogether uncool. Actually, any time anyone take a good look at anything and records the result, that's a piece of the puzzle, whether the piece is expected or not. And such is the vastness of what we don't really know, there's a good chance it will be a piece that nobody's looked at before. Even if it's whale poop.