Making a more accurate pregnancy test for humpback whales

Enlarge / A humpback whale and calf. (credit: flickr user: texaus1)

Peeing on a stick is nobody's idea of fun, but it's a hell of a lot better than what whales have had to deal with: pregnancy test by dart gun. And if a blubber-sampling dart wasn't bad enough, some dart gun pregnancy tests might not even be all that accurate.

A recent paper in Nature Scientific Reports found evidence that the standard humpback whale pregnancy test was failing to spot a whole lot of pregnant females. There's a better way of testing, the researchers suggest-and their results could help conservationists and researchers protect whales.

Counting whales

You can't protect a species very effectively if you have no idea how many individuals are alive and whether their numbers are on the increase or decrease. Estimating populations of wild animals is always tricky, but for whales, it's fiendish-huge territories, long migrations, and of course the whole problem of living underwater mean that scientists have to get inventive to figure out even rough numbers.

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