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Long poop trails were marine biologist Asha de Vos’s first clue that blue whales didn’t always behave the way scientists expected them to. It was 2003, and she had just finished her undergraduate degree and was working on a whale research vessel that was visiting Sri Lankan waters. She’d been told time and again by her undergraduate professors at the University of St. Andrews that blue whales feed only in the cold waters off Antarctica—and that, when in the warmer waters of the Indian Ocean to breed and give birth to their babies, they don’t eat or excrete anything. Spotting the whales’ enormous fecal plumes in the warmer waters showed that, contrary to that assumption, the animals were chowing down while they were in the calving grounds, de Vos tells The Scientist.
Excited by the find and eager to kickstart her research on the whales’ unexpected ...
