"Until recently the dogma was that marine mammals have anatomical and physiological and behavioral adaptations to make the bends not a problem," said MMC Director Michael Moore. "There is no evidence that marine mammals get the bends routinely, but a look at the most recent studies suggest that they are actively avoiding rather than simply not having issues with decompression."

Researchers began to question the conventional wisdom after examining beaked whales that had stranded on the Canary Islands in 2002. A necropsy of those animals turned up evidence of damage from gas bubbles. The animals had stranded after exposure to sonar from nearby naval exercises. This led scientists to think that diving marine mammals might deal with the presence of nitrogen bubbles more frequently than previously thought, and that the animals' response strategies might involve physiological trade-offs depending on situational variables. In other words, the animals likely manage their nitrogen load and probably have greater variation in their blood nitrogen levels than previously believed.

Because the animals spend so much time below the ocean's surface, understanding the behavior of diving marine mammals is quite challenging. The use of innovative technology is helping to advance the science. At WHOI, scientists have used a CT scanner to examine marine mammal cadavers at different pressures to better understand the behavior of gases in the lungs and "get some idea at what depth the anatomy is shut off from further pressure-kinetics issues," Moore said. For other studies, Moore and his colleagues were able to acquire a portable veterinary ultrasound unit to look at the presence or absence of gas in live, stranded dolphins.

There's still a lot to be learned, including whether live animals have circulating bubbles in their systems that they are managing. If they do, says Moore, noise impacts and other stressors that push the animal from a normal management situation to an abnormal situation become more of a concern. "When a human diver has some bubble issues, what will they do? They will either climb into a recompression chamber so that they can recompress and then come back more slowly, or they'll just grab another tank and go back down for a while and . . . and just let things sort themselves out. What does a dolphin do normally when it's surfaced? The next things to do is to dive, and the one place you can't do that is in shallow water or most particularly if you are beached."

via www.sciencenewsline.com