January 26, 2017 — Whale earwax? Really? It’s weird on so many levels—that whales even have earwax, that someone thought to go looking for something like that, and that the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History has stored not one, not ten, but about 1,000 samples of whale earwax plugs for well over 50 years.
And those samples, which not very long ago were gathering dust and some questions about their value, are now turning the scientific community on its (wait for it) . . . ear.
That’s because they are far more than the odd, quotidian and rather gross objects that they seem. We are learning now that samples of whale earwax are quite possibly unique in their ability to describe the life history of the longest-lived marine mammals, as well as give us a glimpse into a place and a time we cannot reach any other way. They are, in effect, physiological and ecological time capsules, and to research scientists who are trying to better understand the world’s oceans they are solid gold.
“It’s a good example of specimens which were collected for one purpose many, many years ago—the first ones were collected at the turn of the 20th century or so—and now as we find another way to interrogate these specimens, we’re able to discover that they have a whole other story to tell,” says Smithsonian researcher Charley Potter, who was the museum’s collection manager in the vertebrate zoology division until he retired in 2015.