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

work on Balaena. and would be better able than Purves to find my way around the
enormous, daunting whale carcasses. So in l955 I worked at Steinshamn with Peter
to establish the best method of extraction and use of the whale ear plug to
determine age, and to develop a method for large scale sampling of the age
composition of the catches of whales. This led to a joint publication and to the
widespread adoption of the method, replacing earlier methods of ageing baleen
whales from ovaries and baleen plates.
A collection of ear plugs was made by Hugh Symons, a Cambridge biologist,
by now Second Chemist on the Balaena who published a short paper on his limited
results. Our biologist Whaling Inspectors were now briefed by me to collect ear
plugs as a routine from the whales sampled from the catches of the whaling
factory ships, and the first collection was made by Malcolm Clarke. I made the
collection available to Peter Purves on the understanding that we would work on
a joint paper, to include the results of our work both on ear plugs, ovaries and
other aspects of this and subsequent collections. Purves had the first crack at
ageing the ear plug collection, which involved preparation by roughly bisecting
the plug longitudinally and then grinding it down on wet and dry paper on a
band-sanding machine; this brought out the finer structure when the layers could
be counted.
I was also ageing the plug collection, but meanwhile I also started work on
certain other aspects. For example, I was interested in looking into the prospects
for 'back-calculation' of whale length from the spacing of the laminae in the ear
plugs. This was a technique that had been pioneered on fish otoliths and opercula
bones (as I had seen as a schoolboy at the Freshwater Biological Association on
Windermere. First it was necessary to determine the relationship between ear plug
core length (the part showing the layering) and whale length. I found a good
correlation and set about measuring the spacing of the layers in individual
earplugs in the samples (up to a maximum of about 80 layers in a single earplug).
I discussed with the NIO workshop technical staff the design and construction of
an instrument to make these numerous measurements. This was essentially a preelectronic
era (for example, at that time I recall that even the physicists were still
using a mechanical spectrum analyser, a revolving drum, for wave heights), and
so my instrument was based on mechanical principles: gearing to enlarge the
spacings in a record on paper strip five-fold, the position of the layer to be
recorded being determined by a cursor with a parallax sighting device; a key to
depress to complete an electric circuit and activiate a chopper bar, which applied a
mark. So I began to collect a large series of such records, which, using methods
established by the fishery biologists, I began to analyse. Happily I found that I was
able to back-calculate whale body length from the ear plugs in this way. I had also
been analysing the reproductive data.
Now Purves dropped a bombshell: he told me that he was going to break our
gentlemen's agreement because he felt that he should be the sole author of the
paper on the collection. He had had access of course to the supporting logbook
data. (In his earlier work, particularly on baleen whale hearing, he had
collaborated with Dr Francis Fraser, FRS, Keeper of Zoology and his boss at the
Natural History Museum, and Peter was upset that the resulting papers had
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