Like a tree's rings, blue whale's earwax tells a story of its life (LA Times) [View all]

[petronius]

Scientists probing a giant plug of earwax pulled from a dead blue whale have discovered in its hardened layers a detailed biography of the wild animal's life, from birth to death, in 6-month chapters.

Their new technique, described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, arms researchers with a tool to understand a whale’s hormonal and chemical biography -- and a window into how pollutants, some long discontinued, still pervade the environment today.

Whales are often called marine sentinels because they can reveal a lot about the waters they pass through, said study coauthor Sascha Usenko, an analytical environmental chemist at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

"These types of marine mammals that are long-lived have a great ability to accumulate contaminants, and so they’re often perceived as being sentinels of their ecosystem," Usenko said.

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http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-blue-whale-ear-wax-plug-pollutants-hormones-20130916,0,6647217.story

And from a bit later in the article:

"It doesn’t necessarily smell great.... When we were pulling it out, some of the crew actually just left."

Pretty cool: I've heard about otoliths used for fisheries and paleoclimate research, but earwax is a whole new ball of... well, you know...