FLICKR, AMILIA TENNAKOONWhen a fin whale opens its mouth to feed on krill, the behemoth takes in more water than food—sometimes even more water than the volume of its entire body. To accommodate such expansion, the cetacean has a pouch at the bottom of its mouth that expands rapidly.
“The pouch stretches, and everything that is in it—all of the wiring, plumbing, and nerves—need to be able to accommodate an increase in length,” said Margo Lillie, a research associate at the University of British Columbia. But just how nervous tissue could endure whale gulping without injury wasn’t clear.
In a study published February 16 in Current Biology, Lillie and colleagues have discovered that these whale nerves stretch without causing permanent damage due to two levels of “waviness”—switchback curves, essentially—within their fibers. The main level of waviness, which has been observed in mammalian nerves before, effectively coils the whole nerve cable, called the core, so that there is sufficient slack. The second level of waviness is more subtle. Within the core, there are bundles of ...
