Three bottlenose whales found dead in Orkney stranding
The Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme (SMASS), a team at the University of Glasgow, arrived in Orkney after the carcasses were discovered by a local dog walker on Monday morning. Warning: this story contains images and descriptions some readers may find distressing
SMASS member Marielle ten Doeschate said: "With any post-mortem we're kind of on the clock, because samples start to degrade, and the more decomposed an animal is the less informative it is for auxiliary tests. "But with deep-diving species we're extra on the ball with that because heat generation means decomposition goes quicker, so we were actually really lucky to get here so quickly."SMASS examined one of the three whales on Tuesday before a high tide put a stop to initial investigations. Despite a noticeable bloating after lying out in the sun, the team found that the whales had all been healthy - though they had not been feeding recently.
SMASS will continue its post-mortem examinations at Vestness in Papa Westray on Wednesday to try to determine a cause of death.Bottlenose whales are deep-diving mammals endemic to the North Atlantic.They are usually found at 800ft (244m) below sea level where there are no predators, feeding on squid.SMASS director Dr Andrew Brownlow, a veterinary pathologist, told BBC Scotland News: "We're getting many more species that we'd normally see further south in warmer waters that seem to be coming up here more frequently in bigger numbers."He said the reason for the shift from their natural habitat remain unconfirmed, but that it ultimately seemed to be as a result of climate change.
'We can learn so much'
However, for Dr Brownlow and his team, the discovery of the whales was not entirely negative.He added: "As sad as it is that they strand like this, we can learn so much about them, we can learn about the individual but also learn about the species - a species of which we know very little."The carcasses were discovered by local firefighter Daniel Elves, who was walking his dogs when the animals "loomed out of the mist". The islanders had just celebrated their annual Papay Fun Weekend, which sees a large increase in its normal population of approximately 70 people for an annual get-together.
"I actually sat down and shed a tear at the colour of the water," Mr Elves said."You couldn't have made it any redder."SMASS attended a similar scene last year when an entire pod of whales was found washed ashore on Tresness Beach, on the island of Sanday, in the largest mass stranding since 1995."July is a particularly bad month for strandings," said Dr Brownlow."In 2023, there was a stranding of 55 pilot whales on the Isle of Lewis. "Almost exactly a year later, 77 of them came in to Sanday."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
Phrenology and IQ tests: the far-right revival of discredited race science
Phrenology was long ago added to the junk heap of discredited theories. But in the 200 years since the Edinburgh Phrenological Society turned this pseudoscientific method to study the skulls of black Africans, Indians and white Europeans, scientific racism has continued to re-emerge in different guises. In the 19th century, as scientists were intent on classifying the natural world into taxonomic categories, some of Edinburgh's most celebrated intellectuals argued that different human races were so distinct that they ought to be considered separate species. The University of Edinburgh report on its legacy of links to slavery and colonialism notes that non-white populations were invariably depicted as inherently inferior, offering a convenient justification for colonialism. As this view became untenable, scientific racism shifted into the domain of eugenics in the 20th century. Francis Galton, the English statistician who coined the term, argued for social measures aimed at 'improving the stock'. Edinburgh's then chancellor, the former Conservative prime minister Arthur Balfour, was a prominent supporter and became honorary vice-chair of the British Eugenics Education Society in 1913. In the US, eugenics inspired forced sterilisation programmes, which disproportionately targeted African American women and, in Nazi Germany, was the ideological backdrop to the Holocaust. The advent of modern genetics and human population data has shattered the idea that there are biologically distinct groups, or that humans that can be neatly categorised based on skin colour or external appearance. Genetic variation between populations is continuous and does not align with social, historical and cultural constructs of race. Race, as a genetic concept, does not exist. Yet, says Angela Saini, author of a book on the return of race science, 'people don't stop believing falsehoods just because the evidence suggests they are wrong'. As IQ testing became the metric of choice for those seeking to draw conclusions about racial differences – often based on biased or fraudulent datasets – old, discredited arguments resurfaced. The Bell Curve, a 1994 bestseller, argued that IQ was heritable and unequally distributed across racial groups. At the University of Edinburgh, students boycotted the lectures of Christopher Brand, a psychology professor, in which he claimed a genetic basis for white intellectual superiority. After he repeated these arguments in his 1996 book, The g Factor (and stoked further controversy by defending paedophilia), Brand was eventually dismissed, while his book was withdrawn and pulped. With the recent rise in ethnic nationalism and the far right globally, a resurgence of interest is under way into theories of racial exceptionalism. Last year, the Guardian revealed that an international network of 'race science' activists, backed by secret funding from a US tech entrepreneur, had been seeking to influence public debate. Discredited ideas on race, genetics and IQ have become staple topics of far-right online discourse. 'The ideas have absolutely not changed at all,' says Prof Rebecca Sear, an anthropologist at Brunel University of London and president of the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association. 'If you can provide a measurement – IQ, skull size – that helps give racism a respectable gloss.' Just like phrenology, Sear says, a lot of contemporary scientific racism is simply 'shockingly bad science'. But when communicated in the form of a graph or chart – whether in a 19th-century lecture theatre or on social media today – pseudoscience and credible science can look similar. 'I would love to see a world in which people stop turning to biology to explain socioeconomic and cultural differences, in which nobody is judged by their racial classification,' says Saini. 'But the University of Edinburgh report is a reminder of how even seemingly smart, educated people can come to believe ridiculous things.'
The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
Edinburgh University's ‘skull room' highlights its complicated history with racist science
Hundreds of skulls are neatly and closely placed, cheekbone to cheekbone, in tall, mahogany-framed glass cabinets. Most carry faded, peeling labels, some bear painted catalogue numbers; one has gold teeth; and the occasional one still carries its skin tissue. This is the University of Edinburgh's 'skull room'. Many were voluntarily donated to the university; others came from executed Scottish murderers; some Indigenous people's skulls were brought to Scotland by military officers on expeditions or conquest missions. Several hundred were collected by supporters of the racist science of phrenology – the discredited belief that skull shape denoted intelligence and character. Among them are the skulls of two brothers who died while studying at Edinburgh. Their names are not recorded in the skull room catalogue, but cross-referencing of matriculation and death records suggests they were George Richards, a 21-year-old medic who died of smallpox in 1832, and his younger brother, Robert Bruce, 18, a divinity scholar who died of typhoid fever in 1833. Exactly how the Richards brothers' skulls came to be separated from their bodies, recorded as interned in the South Leith parish church cemetery, is unknown. But they were almost certainly acquired by the Edinburgh Phrenological Society to study supposed racial difference. Researchers believe their case exemplifies the challenging questions facing the university, which, it has now emerged, played a pivotal role in the creation and perpetuation of racist ideas about white superiority and racial difference from the late 1700s onwards – ideas taught to thousands of Edinburgh students who dispersed across the British empire. University records studied by Dr Simon Buck suggest the brothers were of mixed African and European descent, born in Barbados to George Richards, an Edinburgh-educated doctor who practised medicine on sugar plantations and who owned enslaved people – possibly including George and Robert Bruce's mother. Edinburgh Phrenological Society's 1858 catalogue records the skulls (listed as No 1 and No 2) as having belonged to 'mulatto' students of divinity and medicine. 'It can be assumed that the racialisation of these two individuals as 'mulatto' – a hybrid racial category that both fascinated and bewildered phrenologists – is what aroused interest among members of the society in the skulls of these two students,' Edinburgh's decolonisation report concludes. The brothers' skulls are among the roughly 400 amassed by the society and later absorbed into the anatomical museum's collection, which now contains about 1,500 skulls. These are held in the Skull Room, to which The Guardian was granted rare access. Many of these ancestral remains, the report states, 'were taken, without consent, from prisons, asylums, hospitals, archaeological sites and battlefields', with others 'having been stolen and exported from the British empire's colonies', often gifted by a global network of Edinburgh alumni. 'We can't escape the fact that some of [the skulls] will have been collected with the absolute express purpose of saying, 'This is a person from a specific race, and aren't they inferior to the white man',' said Prof Tom Gillingwater, the chair of anatomy at the University of Edinburgh, who now oversees the anatomical collection. 'We can't get away from that.' The Edinburgh Phrenological Society was founded by George Combe, a lawyer, and his younger brother, Andrew, a doctor, with roughly a third of its early members being physicians. Both were students at the university, and some Edinburgh professors were active members. Through its acquisition of skulls from across the globe, the society played a central role in turning the 'science' of phrenology, which claimed to decode an individual's intellect and moral character from bumps and grooves on the skull, into a tool of racial categorisation that placed the white European man at the top of a supposed hierarchy. George Combe's book, The Constitution of Man, was a 19th-century international bestseller and the Combe Trust (founded with money made from books and lecture tours promoting phrenology) endowed Edinburgh's first professorship in psychology in 1906 and continues to fund annual Combe Trust fellowships in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Phrenology was criticised by some of Edinburgh's medical elite for its unscientific approach. But some of its most vocal critics were nonetheless persuaded that immutable biological differences in intelligence and temperament existed between populations, a study by Dr Ian Stewart for the university's decolonisation report reveals. These included Alexander Monro III, an anatomy professor at the University of Edinburgh medical school, who lectured 'that the Negro skull, and consequently the brain, is smaller than that of the European', and Robert Jameson, a regius professor of natural history, whose lectures at the university in the 1810s included a hierarchical racial diagram of brain size and intelligence. Despite the fact that phrenology was never formally taught at Edinburgh, and its accuracy was heavily contested by Edinburgh academics, the skull room, which is closed to the public, was built partly to house its collection by the then professor of anatomy Sir William Turner, when he helped oversee the construction of its new medical school in the 1880s. Among its reparatory justice recommendations of Edinburgh's investigation is that the university provide more support for the repatriation of ancestral remains to their original communities. This, Gillingwater suggested, possibly underplays the complexities involved – even for cases such as the Richards brothers. He regards the circumstantial evidence in their case as 'strong' but says it does not meet the forensic threshold required for conclusive identification. 'From a legal perspective, it wouldn't be watertight,' said Gillingwater. 'I would never dream of returning remains to a family when I didn't know who they definitely were.' Active engagement surrounding repatriation is taking place in relation to several of the skulls from the phrenology collection; more than 100 have already been repatriated to their places of origin. But each case takes time building trust with communities and in some cases navigating geopolitical tensions over which descendent community has the strongest claim to the remains. 'To look at perhaps repatriation, burials, or whatever, it's literally years of work almost for each individual case,' said Gillingwater. 'And what I found is that every individual culture you deal with wants things done completely differently.' Many of the skulls will never be identified and their provenance is likely to remain unknown. 'That is something that keeps me awake at night,' said Gillingwater. 'For some of our skulls, I know that whatever we do, we're never going to end up with an answer.' 'All I can offer at the minute is that we just continue to care for them,' he added. 'They've been with us, many of them, for a couple of hundred years. So we can look after them. We can care for them. We can treat them with that dignity and respect they all deserve individually.'
Times
10 hours ago
- Times
Scientists' discovery could stop breast cancer spreading
Scottish scientists have made a discovery that could help stop breast cancer spreading to other parts of the body. Experts at Cancer Research UK Scotland Institute and the University of Glasgow have found there are key metabolic changes that take place before tumours grow elsewhere. Their work is being hailed as a significant breakthrough because it is often cancer moving from the breast that kills patients. • How I told my sons that I had a rare form of breast cancer Researchers writing in the journal EMBO Reports said identifying the metabolic changes offered a vital window to intervene. Detecting these changes early could allow therapies to stop cancer cells moving around the body and forming tumours elsewhere. Dr Cassie Clarke, lead researcher, said: 'This study represents a major shift in how we think about preventing the spread of breast cancer. By targeting these metabolic changes as early as possible we could stop the cancer progressing and save lives.' About 56,800 people are diagnosed with breast cancer in the United Kingdom each year and 11,300 people lose their lives to the disease. Dr Catherine Elliott, Cancer Research UK's director of research, said: 'Discoveries in cancer research have made huge strides in making breast cancer a far more treatable disease than ever before. • Why the way we diagnose, label and treat cancer is changing 'However, metastasis — when cancer spreads — is a major factor in breast cancer becoming harder to treat, especially if the cancer returns months or even many years later. 'This discovery gives us new hope for detecting and stopping metastasis early and ensuring people have many more years with their families and loved ones.' The study focused on how breast cancer changes the immune system so it cannot tackle cancer cells as they begin their spread. The researchers found that cancer changes the metabolism — the way cells make and use energy — of specific immune cells, resulting in them releasing a prominent metabolite called uracil. Uracil is a molecule key to essential processes in the body which was found to help distant organs build a 'scaffold' to grow secondary tumours elsewhere in the body. By blocking an enzyme called uridine phosphorylase-1 (UPP1), which produces uracil, the scientists were able to stop this scaffold forming in mice and restore the ability of the immune system to kill secondary cancer cells to prevent metastasis. This opens the door to potentially powerful new tools to tackle cancer. Detecting uracil in the blood could help spot early signs of cancer spread, while blocking UPP1 with drugs could stop the spread before it starts. • The Times View: It is time to be optimistic about cancer The research was funded by Cancer Research UK, the Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council, Breast Cancer Now and Pancreatic Cancer UK. Simon Vincent, chief scientific officer at Breast Cancer Now, said: 'The researchers discovered that high levels of a protein called UPP1 may make some cancers, including breast cancer, more likely to spread to other parts of the body, where the disease becomes incurable. 'In mice, targeting the UPP1 protein before secondary breast cancer developed led to fewer secondary breast tumours and a boosted immune response in the lungs. 'Now we need more research to see if this new insight can be turned into new drugs that stop secondary breast cancer, and potentially other secondary cancers, in their tracks. With around 61,000 people living with secondary breast cancer in the UK, research like this is vital.' The team are further investigating exactly how UPP1 changes the behaviour of immune cells, exploring the role of immune cell metabolism in early breast cancer initiation, and testing the ability of drugs that block immune cell metabolism to prevent cancer occurring.
