No "Bends" for Whales

How whales breathe is a subject which has interested Scientist Alec H. Laurie of London. Aboard a floating whale oil factory off South Georgia, Antarctica, he sampled and studied the lungs and blood of scores of fresh-killed blue whales. He has reported his findings to Nature. Since whales are air-breathing mammals, Scientist Laurie expected to find, in the blood of whales fresh-killed and captured after diving deep, large quantities of dissolved nitrogen, forced into the blood by submarine pressure. Such was not the case. In most samples there was even less nitrogen than is soluble in whale's blood at atmospheric pressure. Peering through his microscope, Scientist Laurie discovered why. He found that whale blood teems with tiny free-swimming organisms, 20 millions of them per cubic millimetre, with the property--familiar in several forms of bacteria--of "fixing" nitrogen. These enable the whale to absorb almost twice the proportion of nitrogen in its blood that a human being can. They save him--when he surfaces swiftly after sounding deep-- from the pain and dizziness called caisson disease or "the bends" experienced by human deep-sea divers, in whose veins bubbles of nitrogen form when they come up too fast.

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