The Insane Biology of: The Narwhal

For centuries, humans have been fascinated by the mystical powers and ethereal beauty of a mysterious spiral horn. A horn thought to possess magical qualities, from purifying water to counteracting deadly poisons and diseases, if ingested, its powers were so sought after that Queen Elizabeth paid 10,000 for it. a horn in the 16th century 6.3 million in today's money, but Queen Elizabeth and all other previls of this magical horn were certifiably deceived. The horn they coveted was a real thing and probably inspired the Legends of the Unicorn, but the real creature is not so ethereal. Maybe you'd be thinking that it's still a majestic creature, even if it's not a unicorn, yeah, maybe you'd think that until you learn that that spiral horn is actually a tooth, an extremely long and strange rabbit tooth, the Narwhal of somehow gets away with it, except every other animal. with a single 3m long tooth it would be canceled immediately and things don't get any better when you learn that the name

narwhal

comes from Old Norse meaning corpse whale because the color of their skin resembles that of a drowned sailor and honestly they just keep getting more rare Learn more Scientists attached satellite trackers to cameras on the

narwhal

s and watched them spend most of their hunting time swimming upside down.

In rare cases, belugas and narwhals have even mated to create the narwhal hybrid. Narwhals are also one of the few satian species that polar bears have. They will actively hunt rather than wait for a carcass to wash ashore, which means they must be especially careful about where and when they come up to breathe, but even despite this, they have an incredible lifespan and are estimated to be able to live up to 100 years because Narwhals are not only rare, but also incredibly tough. Narwhals are one of the deepest divers, swimming up to 1,800 m underwater to search for food and going especially deep in the winter.

They make 18 to 25 dives per day thanks to their thick fat that provides them with insulation. and energy, foldable ribs that bend under high pressures and an incredible capacity to store 70 liters of oxygen in their lungs, blood and muscles, their bodies do not have the fast-twitch skeletal muscles that give dolphins such propulsion speeds and On the other hand, they have muscles more capable of handling. endurance swimming which requires less oxygen, but the biggest question about them is what about that horn or rather that big old tooth? Sure, it's fun trying to guess multitool Intergalactic Antenna Supersonic Speed ​​Skewers Predator Evasion within a meter of your lies, but jokes aside scientists I still don't really know the real answer.

Some past theories about its purpose included sound transmission, thermal regulation, ice breaking, and even a respiratory organ, but as usually only males grow the horn, it cannot be critical for survival, and yet some females do. they do it. I also have the horn, so it's probably not just for mating, so what the hell is going on here? What the hell are these horns with long, protruding teeth for narwhals? They belong to the order of the odonto cetti or toothed whales, like their distant relatives, the sperm whales and the orca narwhals are equipped with teeth, but only two of them and, in their case, the teeth are actually known as tusks.

Female narwhals have two tusks embedded in the jaw that rarely become visible in about 1.5% of females. It will grow into a huge spear just like the males and in some cases the males will not have fangs, although sometimes they will also grow for reasons we do not understand. Although the horns are called fangs, they have a very similar anatomy to others. breast teeth the outer layers of the tusk are a hard material to protect the nerve on the inside the outermost layer is cementum a calcified material to protect the tooth immediately below is the dentin which is more bone-like and immediately surrounds the tissue pulp, what is unusual about narwhals is that they do not have an enamel covering to protect their tusk and the cementum and dentin actually have fluid-filled channels called dentinal tubules that interact with the environment and pass messages to the nerve that It goes directly to the brain.

All mom's teeth have these canals, but they are usually covered by enamel, otherwise the tooth becomes hypersensitive to s Uli and painful. Think about what happens when you bite straight into a popsicle. I can't even watch people bite into ice cream without shuddering. Many people are like me and experiment. discomfort in their teeth because our teeth are sensitive to sudden changes in temperature and that is with a layer of enamel that protects our dentinal tubules, however, narwhals have a tooth that protrudes 2 to 3 m without enamel that is almost always submerged in Arctic ice water that we use.

I'm not sure their teeth hurt, but it certainly seems uncomfortable to have a sensitive, fully innervated tooth constantly exposed to ice water, but maybe there's a good reason for such a sensitive tooth, so researchers devised a fascinating test to see what it could be. useful because they decided to measure how well a tusk can detect changes in water salinity. This is a potentially very important adaptation because one of the risks of living in the Arctic is getting stuck in what is called entrapment. Narwhals breathe air like all mammals, but they live in an environment completely covered in ice in the 25,000 square kilometers of waterways they traverse;

There is often less than 3% open water and sometimes only half open water and they cannot pierce the ice with their fangs. If the weather changes suddenly with a cold blast and wind, ice can form incredibly hard. By quickly closing off areas where narwhals need to surface to breathe, whales may become stranded without enough breathing holes and hundreds of them will squeeze into smaller and smaller openings in the solid ice, many of them sadly. They die if they cannot reach the small ice gap in time and those who manage to fight for space to breathe become easy prey for polar bears that gather around the holes to breathe only between 2008 and 2010, as reported by Loc by trapping of large groups. of narwhals up to 600 individuals due to the sudden growth of sea ice so how does salinity influence the dangers of becoming trapped?

Because ice contains very little salt, only water freezes, so the water around the newly formed ice becomes much saltier than in other locations, meaning that being able to sense a sudden increase in salinity would be very useful for the narwhals because they would know it was time to reserve it and avoid getting trapped in the ice. Now back to the study, the researchers captured six male narwhals and hooked them. They used electrodes to detect its heart rate and then made a jacket for the tusk so they could fill it with fresh water and then a high-salt solution.

The researchers found that the narwhal's heart rate decreased with fresh water and increased dramatically with salt water, probably because the narwhals were panicking about getting stuck in the ice, although that's not something we can ask them directly, which the test confirmed. For the researchers, it is that the tusks have sensory capabilities and that if the tusk is damaged as was the case with two of the males, they have a harder shape. It's time detecting changes in salinity and we know that narwhals travel in pods sometimes with hundreds of members, so maybe those that don't have a tusk are simply receiving signals from those that do, but that doesn't explain what's happening. with an all-female pack when there is none. many of them have tusks so it seems like the tusk can't be just for this, there has to be more going on with this protruding tooth horn even though narwhals only have two teeth and neither are adapted for chewing, in They actually eat quite large fish. including hbit cod and gonatus squid, find their prey by echolocation and then swallow them whole using a strategy called suction feeding.

They basically create a vacuum in their mouth by retracting their tongue and simply slurp up the fish, although narwhals are very difficult to follow in the wild. We have learned a lot about their diet thanks to their long history of hunting. Scientists have studied preserved remains of their stomach, as well as stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen in their skin, to understand what they eat and at what depth. In the past, researchers thought narwhals were picky eaters and would therefore be more likely to suffer the combined effects of climate change and overfishing, but a recent study compared the world's three major narwhal populations. , from Baffin Bay to northern Hudson.

Bay and eastern Greenland, scientists were surprised to discover that their diets were quite varied from place to place. In eastern Greenland, the narwhal appears to feed more in a pelagic food web, especially on kaalan fish, northern Hudson Bay narwhals fed more on Ben thic. Explained in part by the fact that they live in shallower waters, they ate mainly bean shrimp, the Baff and Bay narwhals had the highest levels of nitrogen 15 isotopes, meaning they feed at the highest trophic level of the three groups, including much habit, but possibly the most interesting of all were the differences between the diets of males and females.

Males are significantly larger than females and appear to make more frequent and deeper dives in order to feed on benthic species more easily. It is possible that their larger size allows them to retain more oxygen. for these dives and then there is the presence of the fang using it to stab the prey. Kebab style seems like a bad idea because narwhals would have no way to get it out of their tusk, but in 2017 scientists captured images of narwhals using their tusk. to hit the fish, which seemed to stun them momentarily. IM mobile and from there the narwhals could more easily suck in the fish.

This behavior has only been seen once, so it's impossible to say if it's a widespread practice, we also don't know if it makes males better hunters than females, but that certainly doesn't seem to be the case, so it seems like it still must. There is something more to this toothed horn. We have seen that narwhal tusks are sensitive to the surrounding environment and useful for striking fish in the water. head, but are these the true purposes of nasal fangs or just a nice secondary benefit when a specific trait appears in males and not females of a species?

Scientists are looking at a couple of clues to try to figure out whether that trait is the result of sexual selection or not. One of the first things to examine is fitness, not in the jimro sense, but in the context of being able to survive in the environment. environment; In other words, tuskless female narwhals are able to thrive in the Arctic. The answer is yes, which suggests. the tusk is not a crucial element for survival, so perhaps this horn has more to do with mating or sexual selection? To understand this, it is important to consider hyperallometry, which is common in sexually selected traits, meaning that, for the body size of the organism, the sexually selected traits are larger than would be expected, take the claw of a crab.

Fiddler, for example, an important tool for adopting aggressive postures and for attracting mates As a male crab's body grows larger, the claw does not grow in size with it in a one-to-one ratio, it grows even larger, This steep line has a slope of 1.56, meaning that the relationship between these beefy claws and body size is hyperallometric, and hyperallometry is common in sexually selected traits because more exaggerated traits can more easily indicate their genetic quality. to his companions even from a distance. Narwhal horns also fall into this category to test the hypothesis that narwhal tusks are sexually selected.

The researchers compared the body and tusk size of 245 adult male narwhals collected between 1983 and 2018. Sure enough, they found that the relationship between tusk length and body length was hyper allometric and another study found that a Larger tusk correlates with a larger pair of testicles and the tusk continues to grow throughout the narwhal's life, so it becomes increasingly longer as they age. The real question about the narwhal is whether the size of the tusk is larger. The image of a large tusk alone is enough to attract a female or if the males also show some type of dominance.

The researchers haveIt has been discovered that between 40 and 60% of male narwhals have damaged or broken tusks and many of them have scars on their heads and even pieces of tusk embedded in their jaw, the tusks cannot withstand direct ramming forces, but are Durable enough for lateral attacks. This could explain why we sometimes see male narwhals crossing their tusks over the water, perhaps they are doing some kind of jousting. For females we simply don't know because their breeding period tends to be in March and April, when they are still living in the dense ice of winter. You may also wonder if these fangs are for the sole purpose of finding a mate.

Since narwhals also have the ability to stun fish and sense how salty the ocean is, there are also a couple of theories about this, maybe those traits were obtained from the evolutionary ancestor of narwhals, maybe the fangs were used solely for sensory purposes until some of the females started selecting males for the size of the tusk, on the other hand the tusk could currently be evolving into a sensory organ, perhaps its additional abilities are nice little add-ons, we know that the claws Of crustaceans not only serve to find a mate, but they can also be used as weapons to hunt prey and for chemical communication, who knows, maybe one day all the walls of Nar will end with both male and female horns, for example.

Now scientists aren't sure why some females end up with tusks or why some males have two. The answer may reveal itself over time, depending on which whales appear to be gaining or losing tusks over the generations, for now narwhals remain one of the ocean's most mysterious animals and while I'm not a fan of a toothy horn singularities that stand out in most animals. suits Narwhal very well, there is something truly beautiful about reflecting on the complexity of evolution over the billions of years that life has existed on this planet, whether wondering about the existence of a strange whale tooth or reflecting about how a single cell becomes many reproductions, mutations, giving rise to sponges, worms, jellyfish, invertebrates and vertebrates, spilop pods, birds, reptiles, mammals and eventually us , there have been so many pivotal moments during the course of evolution that resulted in the world.

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