The secret behind large whales' ability to gulp massive amounts of food at once is now revealed to be elastic nerves.
According to BBC News, the discovery, detailed in a study published in the journal Current Biology, would be a first among vertebrates. The researchers examined rorquals, a family of whales that includes humpbacks and blues.
"This discovery was totally unexpected and unlike other nerve structures we've seen in vertebrates, which are of a more fixed length," Wayne Vogl, of the University of British Columbia's Cellular and Physiological Sciences department, said in a press release. "The rorquals' bulk feeding mechanism required major changes in anatomy of the tongue and mouth blubber to allow large deformation, and now we recognize that it also required major modifications in the nerves in these tissues so they could also withstand the deformation."
