TAMPA, Florida (11 Jan 2004) -- Once again, science has taken some of the bizarre, spookiness and fun out of life. When an unappetizing 41-foot-long, 19-foot-wide, 13-ton blob washed onto a Chilean beach in July 2003, the thing was an absolute marine mystery. But University of South Florida-Tampa scientists tested samples of the goo and determined that the massive mess was nothing more than a badly decomposed sperm whale. "I've gotten pieces of eight or 10 of these carcasses, and unfortunately, they've all been whales," USF professor of biology Skip Pierce said in a telephone interview. "It would have been much better if we'd discovered a sea monster. That would be more interesting." Pierce was in New Orleans on Wednesday and will deliver a paper on his findings today at the 2004 meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. To do its tests, the USF team obtained two tennis-ball-sized mini-blobs from the Center for Cetacean Conservation in Santiago, Chile. "The blob was announced on the Internet right after it was found, and one of my graduate students e-mailed down, and we got two samples," Pierce said. "They sort of look like white or grayish or pinkish fibrous things. They're tough, the consistency of old rubber tires." | | The team used DNA and an electron microscope to identify the samples as erstwhile whale. USF scientists compared the findings with other whale blob samples, including one from a whale that washed up in 1896 on a St. Augustine Beach. Pierce got a glob of that blob with the help of world-famous marine biologist Eugenie Clark. "It had been preserved at the Smithsonian many years, but somehow it vanished," Pierce said. "A guy in Gainesville, a retired anatomy professor, had gotten a piece of it in the 1960s. The rumor was that he kept it in his refrigerator. "Genie was a colleague of mine at the University of Maryland. She knew the guy and arranged to get a piece of it from him. We identified it as a whale." The Chilean sperm whale blob matched the St. Augustine whale blob, as well as a Tasmanian blob recovered in 1960, two blobs from Bermuda (1995 and 1997), and one from Nantucket, Mass. (1996). Makes a person think that maybe there are no sea monsters. "I don't know," Pierce said. "The sea is pretty deep." SOURCE - News-Press |
