Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News

A Whale's Gas Bubble And Fecal Plume

Aug. 27, 2003 — For the first time, scientists have both witnessed and photographed a whale gas bubble, suggesting that flatulence is just as common for ocean mammals as it is for humans and many other terrestrial animals.

The picture is best described by Nick Gales, principal research scientist in the Applied Marine Mammal Ecology Group of the Australian Antarctic Division in Tasmania. Gales was leading an expedition of the Charolotte Pass between Marguerite Bay and Palmer Station, Antarctica, when the ship's captain, Joe Borkowski III, took the photo.

"The picture is of an Antarctic minke whale taken from the bow of a ship," Gales explained. "The white bits in the photo are pieces of ice-floe, the stream of pinky color behind the whale is a fecal plume — a.k.a. "poo" — the large circle in the water is indeed the physical eruption of the whale's flatulence."

e>