The minke whale samples used by Palumbi and Baker were obtained from meat markets in Japan, although they were originally slaughtered for ''scientific research.'' The irony, says Palumbi, is that the genetic research could have been conducted without harming a single whale. ''DNA data can very easily be obtained from a harmless skin biopsy,'' he adds, ''so no one needs to kill them and sell them into a meat market.''
Family trees
Palumbi will address many of these issues during his presentation at AAAS. ''My talk is going to be about the next chapter in this controversy, and what we're trying to do to solve it,'' he says. ''In the last 12 months, we've gotten a much better set of mathematical and analytical tools for taking genetic diversity data and turning them into past history and past population size.''
According to Palumbi, these new tools will allow researchers to use DNA sequencing to construct cetacean ''family trees.''
''The shape of that family tree tells us a lot about how the population has changed over time,'' he explains. ''The parts of the tree that bulge out mean that the population was bigger and doing well at that point in the past. The parts that narrow down are points in the past where the population has shrunk. Think of those family trees of royal houses in Europe, where one queen has 12 children, so it bulges out there, but none of the children do very well, for various reasons, so the tree collapses back down again.''
The same holds true for whale genealogies, he adds. ''We're able to read back in time and see how the population changes. We're hoping to see if, as the ice ages come and go, whether the populations dwindle and then come back up again. Our hope is to be able to use this as a tool to see how wha
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Contact: Mark Shwartz
mshwartz@stanford.edu
650-723-9296
Stanford University
19-Feb-2005