A Taxonomy of World Whaling

Reeves, Randall R.; Smith, Tim D.

doi:10.1525/california/9780520248847.003.0008

Cited by 38 publications

(48 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Regardless of evolutionary sequence, we argue that multiple lines of evidence indicate that the sensory organ has a key role in lunge feeding by registering the rotation of the mandibles during a lunge and the expansion of the throat pouch through the YSF, all of which evolved before the extremely large body sizes observed in today's rorquals. Despite the opportunity to observe the adult morphology of large rorquals during decades of sustained hunting 30 , these findings demonstrate how poorly we understand the basic functional morphology of these ecologically important ocean predators. …”

Section: Letter Researchmentioning

confidence: 93%

Discovery of a sensory organ that coordinates lunge feeding in rorqual whales

Pyenson

Goldbogen

Vogl

et al. 2012

Nature

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Top ocean predators have evolved multiple solutions to the challenges of feeding in the water [1][2][3] . At the largest scale, rorqual whales (Balaenopteridae) engulf and filter prey-laden water by lunge feeding 4 , a strategy that is unique among vertebrates 1 . Lunge feeding is facilitated by several morphological specializations, including bilaterally separate jaws that loosely articulate with the skull 5,6 , hyper-expandable throat pleats, or ventral groove blubber 7 , and a rigid y-shaped fibrocartilage structure branching from the chin into the ventral groove blubber 8 . The linkages and functional coordination among these features, however, remain poorly understood. Here we report the discovery of a sensory organ embedded within the fibrous symphysis between the unfused jaws that is present in several rorqual species, at both fetal and adult stages. Vascular and nervous tissue derived from the ancestral, anterior-most tooth socket insert into this organ, which contains connective tissue and papillae suspended in a gel-like matrix. These papillae show the hallmarks of a mechanoreceptor, containing nerves and encapsulated nerve termini. Histological, anatomical and kinematic evidence indicate that this sensory organ responds to both the dynamic rotation of the jaws during mouth opening and closure, and ventral groove blubber 7 expansion through direct mechanical linkage with the y-shaped fibrocartilage structure. Along with vibrissae on the chin 9 , providing tactile prey sensation, this organ provides the necessary input to the brain for coordinating the initiation, modulation and end stages of engulfment, a paradigm that is consistent with unsteady hydrodynamic models and tag data from lunge-feeding rorquals [10][11][12][13] . Despite the antiquity of unfused jaws in baleen whales since the late Oligocene 14 ( 23-28 million years ago), this organ represents an evolutionary novelty for rorquals, based on its absence in all other lineages of extant baleen whales. This innovation has a fundamental role in one of the most extreme feeding methods in aquatic vertebrates, which facilitated the evolution of the largest vertebrates ever.Large marine suspension feeders have evolved many times over the past 200 million years (Myr) 1-3 . These vertebrates, which include extinct bony fish, chondrichthyans and baleen whales (Mysticeti), all show similar morphological specializations for feeding in water while maintaining large body sizes 2,3 . For those vertebrates with solely aquatic ancestries, such as bony fish and chondrichthyans, feeding modes mostly consist of variations on unidirectional ram filter feeding, using gill rakers 1 . By contrast, baleen whales are secondarily adapted to marine environments from a terrestrial ancestry 3 . Their feeding specializations thus reflect a trade-off between evolutionary innovations (for example, baleen) and fundamental constraints from a mammalian body plan (such as air breathing) 3 . The origin of suspension feeding in mysticetes represents an evolutionary novelty with no ...

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Section: Letter Researchmentioning

confidence: 93%

Discovery of a sensory organ that coordinates lunge feeding in rorqual whales

Pyenson

Goldbogen

Vogl

et al. 2012

Nature

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“…The legacy of multiple whaling eras [36], especially across a global dataset, can explain the relatively low abundances of right whales (Eubalaena spp.) in this study, although longer coastlines (both US coasts) did recover this taxon in their death assemblages, whereas The Netherlands did not.…”

Section: (D) Sampling Biasesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The high fidelity of the cetacean stranding record: insights into measuring diversity by integrating taphonomy and macroecology

Pyenson

2011

Proc. R. Soc. B.

100

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Stranded cetaceans have long intrigued naturalists because their causation has escaped singular explanations. Regardless of cause, strandings also represent a sample of the living community, although their fidelity has rarely been quantified. Using commensurate stranding and sighting records compiled from archived datasets representing nearly every major ocean basin, I demonstrated that the cetacean stranding record faithfully reflects patterns of richness and relative abundance in living communities, especially for coastlines greater than 2000 km and latitudinal gradients greater than 48. Live-dead fidelity metrics from seven different countries indicated that strandings were almost always richer than live surveys; richness also increased with coastline length. Most death assemblages recorded the same ranked relative abundance as living communities, although this correlation decreased in strength and significance at coastline lengths greater than 15 000 km, highlighting the importance of sampling diversity at regional scales. Rarefaction analyses indicated that sampling greater than 10 years generally enhanced the completeness of death assemblages, although protracted temporal sampling did not substitute for sampling over longer coastlines or broader latitudes. Overall, this global live -dead comparison demonstrated that strandings almost always provided better diversity information about extant cetacean communities than live surveys; such archives are therefore relevant for macroecological and palaeobiological studies of cetacean community change through time.

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“…After 1991, network reporting increased its coverage across the United States, using taxonomic identifications that were widely recognized or sufficient (Heyning 1991;see MacLeod et al 2005, for a similar rationale). The 1970s also mark the end of commercial, industrial whaling in waters of the ENP, and thus this aspect of human impact on the cetacean community may be constrained, although the effects of whaling on some ENP cetacean species remain apparent on levels of abundance, especially for some species of large baleen whales (Clapham et al 1999;Reeves and Smith 2006).…”

Section: Temporal Scale Of Both the Strandings And Live Surveysmentioning

confidence: 99%

Carcasses on the coastline: measuring the ecological fidelity of the cetacean stranding record in the eastern North Pacific Ocean

Pyenson¹

2010

Paleobiology

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Abstract.-To understand how well fossil assemblages represent original communities, paleoecologists seek comparisons between death assemblages and their source communities. These comparisons have traditionally used nearshore, marine invertebrate assemblages for their logistical ease, high abundance, and comparable census data from living communities. For large marine vertebrates, like cetaceans, measuring their diversity in ocean ecosystems is difficult and expensive. Cetaceans, however, often beach or strand themselves along the coast, and archived data on stranded cetaceans have been recorded, in some areas, over several decades. If the stranding record is interpreted as a death assemblage, then the stranding record may represent a viable alternative for measuring diversity in living communities on directly adjacent coastlines. This study assessed the fidelity of the cetacean stranding record in the eastern North Pacific Ocean. The living community in this region has been studied for over 100 years and, recently, extensive and systematic live transect surveys using ship-based observing platforms have produced a valuable source of live diversity data. Over this same period, the U.S. Marine Mammal Stranding Program has collected and archived a record of cetacean strandings along the U.S. Pacific coastline, providing an ideal death assemblage for comparison. Using fidelity metrics commonly used in marine invertebrate taphonomy, I determined that the stranding record samples the living cetacean community with high fidelity, across fine and coarse taxonomic ranks, and at large geographic scales (.1000 km of coastline). The stranding record is also richer than the live surveys, with live-dead ratios between 1.1 and 1.3. The stranding record recovers similar rank-order relative abundances as live surveys, with statistical significance. Also, I applied sample-based rarefaction methods to generate collector's curves for strandings along the U.S. Pacific Coast to better evaluate the spatiotemporal characteristics of the stranding record. Results indicate that saturation (i.e., sampling .95% assemblage) at species, genus, and family levels occurs in less than five years of sampling, with families accumulating faster than species, and larger geographic regions (i.e., longer coastlines) accumulating taxa the most rapidly. The high fidelity of the stranding record, measured both in richness and by ranked relative abundance, implies that ecological structure from living cetacean communities is recorded in the death assemblage, a finding that parallels marine invertebrate assemblages, though at far larger spatial scales. These results have implications for studying cetacean ecology in both modern and ancient environments: first, these results imply that the stranding record, over sufficiently long time intervals, yields a richer assemblage than using linetransect methods, and faithfully records aspects of community structure; and second, these results imply that geochronologically well-constrained fossil cetacean assemblages ...

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A Taxonomy of World Whaling

Cited by 38 publications

References 22 publications

Discovery of a sensory organ that coordinates lunge feeding in rorqual whales

Discovery of a sensory organ that coordinates lunge feeding in rorqual whales

The high fidelity of the cetacean stranding record: insights into measuring diversity by integrating taphonomy and macroecology

Carcasses on the coastline: measuring the ecological fidelity of the cetacean stranding record in the eastern North Pacific Ocean

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