Part I: Seals teeth and whales ears - Scott Polar Research Institute ...

I have mentioned that there were tensions, not least between Mackintosh and
Deacon. This probably reflected the historical background to the NIO: in some
respects Mackintosh was senior to Deacon, and this had been the case in Discovery
Investigations; Deacon and Marr, old shipmates on Discovery, were very close and
Deacon, a physicist remember, interfered in the editorial process involved in the
production of Marr's 'great work' on the krill. In my view this had probably been
quite a tight monograph ten years earlier, but with slack research discipline it had
become very diffuse and wandering, so that the scientific arguments tended to get
lost in hyperbole, hypotheses over the course of decades had become
theories/axioms and the whole work needed tightening up. When ultimately
published in l962, after a gestation period of a decade or so it comprised 463 pages
including 157 figures, 64 tables and a bibliography of about 750 titles.
Mackintosh tried to make it less discursive, but was over-ruled by Deacon; he
invoked the help of Professor Alister Hardy, FRS, a zooplankton specialist and
stalwart of the Discovery Investigations days, to no avail. Although Hardy, with a
similar specialisation to Marr, supported Mackintosh this wasn't enough.
Reluctantly and not without a fight Mackintosh, a real gentleman, gave in, but
significantly he negotiated a disclaimer in the form of a flatly stated Editor's note:
namely, "This report is a comprehensive study of an important organism in
relation to its environment and the treatment and interpretation of the data are those of
the author." (my emphasis). I don't recall any other report in the series that has such
an Editor's note. However, it must be said that Marr's report is a very significant
contribution to Antarctic biology, although I suspect that only a handful of
biologists have read it thoroughly; it would be a daunting prospect! It was in these
strained conditions that we pursued our research.
My research on the whale ear plug
I should here mention my involvement in the establishment of an exciting
new method of age determination for baleen whales. I had brought back from my
Balaena voyage, deep-frozen, a large chunk of fin whale whale skull, containing
the auditory meatus, middle and inner ear; it included the so-called wax plug,
described by Lillie in l9ll [?]. This was requested by Francis Fraser and Peter
Purves, his assistant, for experimental investigation of the auditory process (i.e.,
hearing mechanism) of baleen whales. However, in the course of his work Purves
had examined the wax plug collected by Lillie and held in the Museum
collections, and a paper on the wax plug in the ear of baleen whales was in proof,
due for publication under Purves' name in the Discovery Reports in July l955.
The significance of the wax plug, or ear plug as it was later called, apart from
its functional significance in conducting sound to the inner ear, lay in the fact that
Purves, on sectioning Lillie's specimen, had discovered that it showed discrete
layers, like the layers I had found in teeth of seals and other mammals. Clearly
these might be useful in estimating the age of baleen whales, with more precision
than before. For some reason this discovery had been kept very secret until that
summer when it was proposed that I should go with Peter Purves to conduct field
work on whales from the shore Whaling Station, Steinshamn, Norway. (This
expedition is described in a later section). I had the necessary experience from my
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