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A28 SCIENCE
Saturday 3 June 2017

Science Says: Whale of a mystery solved? How they got so big

SETH BORENSTEIN in Tuesday’s Proceedings
AP Science Writer of the Royal Society B.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Sci- Their study has proposed
entists think they have an answer: Ice ages in the
answered a whale of a last 3 to 5 million years start-
mystery: How the ocean ed it, changing the oceans
creatures got so huge so and food supply for whales.
quickly. The researchers used fos-
A few million years ago, the sil records of the smaller
largest whales, averaged whales to create a family
maybe 15 feet long. That’s tree for baleen whales —
big, but you could still hold which include blue whales,
a fossil skull in two hands. humpbacks and right
Then seemingly overnight, whales. Using computer
one type of whale — the simulations and knowledge
toothless baleens — be- about how evolution works,
came huge. Modern blue they started filling in the
whales get as big as 100 gaps between the small
feet, the largest creatures whales and the modern
ever on Earth. Its skull is now super-sized version. They
bigger than a minivan and keyed in on a time period
could probably fit more when the whales got huge
than five people inside, re- and smaller whale species
searchers said. went extinct, somewhere
“We really are living in the between a few hundred
time of giants,” said study thousand years ago and
co-author Nicholas Pyen- 4.5 million years ago. In this photo taken July 9, 2014, humpback whales feed at the Stellwagen Bank National Marine
son of the Smithsonian Nat- They concluded that when Sanctuary off Cape Cod near Provincetown, Mass.
ural History Museum. “Why the size changes started, Associated Press
is that?” the poles got colder, ice
And it happened “in the expanded and the water ally bubbled back up in ters they capture. Toothed 15 to 100 feet in about
blink of an evolutionary circulation in the oceans patches rich with the small whales, like sperm whales, the same time as humans
eye,” which makes it hard- changed and winds shift- fish and other small critters hunt individual fish or squid, evolved, he said.
er to figure out what hap- ed. Slater and Pyenson that whales eat. so the ocean changes that Olivier Lambert at the Royal
pened, said Graham Slater said cold water went deep Before that, whale food made food less evenly Belgian Institute of Natural
at the University of Chica- and moved closer to the was spread out, relatively spread out didn’t affect Sciences, who wasn’t part
go, lead author of the study equator and then eventu- easy to get at. Now, they them as much. But baleen of the study, calls it “a re-
are giant buffets amid whales hunt schools of fish ally convincing scenario.”
hundreds of miles of whale or swarms of krill, Pyenson But he said the lack of fos-
food deserts. That’s why said. sils in certain time periods is
you can see lots of whales “If you are a whale, the an issue.
in the summer in Califor- easiest way to take advan- As oceans warm from man-
nia’s Monterey Bay, Slater tage of dense but sparsely made climate change,
said. available resources is to the seas will be more like
Baleen whales, which have get big,” Slater said. “If you it was when the whales
Lipstixaruba@outlook.com no teeth, feed by gulp- are big, you basically can were smaller and they will
ing tremendous amount get more miles to the gal- have a more difficult time
of ocean, filtering out the lon.” surviving, Slater and others
water and eating the crit- Baleen whales went from said.q