So I was lucky enough to get a call also from a tour boat that they saw a whale, what they believed to be a whale that gave birth, and they saw this big floating blob on the surface of the water and called me to come and pick it up.
And it was a whale’s placenta and so I was actually recovered it and sampled it, and it will be a future publication that I have not written yet coming.
But I was able to recover at a full and complete humpback whale placenta, aAnd it’s the first time since the whaling industry that we were able to sample this for, histopathology testing.
So it’s pretty exciting, moment and just really cool. It’s hard to, convey how big it was, but I always tell people, well, big enough to hold a baby whale, if that gives you an idea.
It was pretty large but, like, you know, very slimy and goopy and disintegrated very quickly. So we had to work quite quickly, actually, to sample it because it’s, like, quite literally falling apart in our hands as we were handling it.
Which I guess makes sense, you know, in the ocean, it would be broken up and eaten by predators and become part of the ecosystem there. Yeah. So very large.
-Stephanie
This post was adapted from a voice recording in episode 75 of the Whale Tales Podcast, listen here.
Photo credits: Stephanie Stack
Leave a Reply