John McCarthy, Flinders College
About 10 years in the past, marine biologists witnessed two totally different species of whales in several geographic places engaged in a novel feeding technique. The whales would place themselves on the water’s floor and keep immobile with their mouths huge open. Fish would swim into their mouths, and the whales would snap their jaws and swallow. It has been dubbed lure feeding, or tread-water feeding. A clip of whales engaged in lure feeding even went viral on Instagram in 2021.
But this feeding technique may not be as current as scientists initially thought. Researchers at Flinders College in Australia have discovered putting descriptions of what sounds loads like lure feeding in Previous Norse descriptions of the habits of a sea creature referred to as the hafgufa, based on a new paper revealed within the journal Marine Mammal Science. That creature, in flip, could be traced again to medieval bestiaries and a kind of whale referred to as aspidochelone, first talked about in a 2nd century CE Alexandrian manuscript referred to as the Physiologus.
“It’s thrilling as a result of the query of how lengthy whales have used this method is essential to understanding a spread of behavioral and even evolutionary questions,” mentioned co-author Erin Sebo, a medievalist at Flinders College. “Marine biologists had assumed there was no method of recovering this knowledge however, utilizing medieval manuscripts, we’ve been capable of reply a few of their questions.”
Whales deploy a wide range of feeding methods. For example, lunge feeding entails charging at faculties of fish with the mouth open, whereas whales engaged in bubble-net feeding create a spherical curtain of bubbles to pay attention fish earlier than charging into the middle to feed. Scientists first noticed lobtail feeding within the Nineteen Eighties, novel habits that appears to have been pushed by a pointy decline in herring populations due to overfishing. The habits is culturally transmitted between related teams of whales.
John McCarthy, Flinders College
Lure feeding was first recorded in 2011 in a gaggle of humpback whales feeding on herring off Vancouver Island. The invention was revealed in 2018 after a separate 2017 paper reporting related feeding habits amongst Bryde’s whales feasting on anchovies within the Gulf of Thailand. Equally to the emergence of lobtail feeding, some researchers surmised that the habits developed in response to elevated air pollution, “lifeless zones,” algal blooms, and related environmental challenges, which had pushed the whales’ prey nearer to the water’s floor. Others thought it’d merely be a very energy-efficient technique of feeding when the fish inhabitants is much less densely clustered.
Co-author John McCarthy, a maritime archaeologist at Flinders College, thought the current trap-feeding habits was strikingly much like Norse descriptions of the hafgufa, most notably in a thirteenth century textual content referred to as King’s Mirror (Konungs skuggsjá). It is described as a sea creature of nice measurement with an uncommon feeding methodology:
[W]hen it goes to feed, it offers a terrific belch out of its throat, together with which comes quite a lot of meals. All kinds of close by fish collect, each small and enormous, searching for there to amass meals and good sustenance. However the huge fish retains its mouth open for a time, no kind of huge than a big sound or fjord, and unknowing and unheeding, the fish rush in of their numbers. And when its stomach and mouth are full, [the hafgufa] closes its mouth, thus catching and hiding inside it all of the prey that had come searching for meals.
That could be a exceptional correct description of lure feeding, and the important thing particulars are additionally present in earlier medieval bestiaries and the aforementioned Physiologus: a creature holding its jaws open, emitting a scent or scent that draws small fish to leap in its mouth, with the creature snapping its jaws shut and swallowing when sufficient fish have amassed within the lure. “The custom remained remarkably coherent and constant over 1,500 years, with minimal embellishment or reinterpretation,” the authors wrote. Additional, the creatures in these earlier supply texts are recognized as whales, not legendary sea monsters. Lots of these texts even have illustrations exhibiting sea creatures consuming fish in a way paying homage to lure feeding.
