Dani Crain

Our first Baylor University WISE Graduate Student Seminar Speaker is Dani Crain. Dani Crain is working on her PhD in animal physiology with Dr. Stephen Trumble in the Biology Department here at Baylor University. Her talk is entitled “Waxing Nostalgic: 100 years of pregnant whales using earplugs.”

Summary: We don’t know much about the life history of baleen whales – what we do know is based off of outdated whaling data or from incomplete long term observational data sets. So let me wax nostalgic, instead. There is a fin whale, born in 1916 in the North Atlantic Ocean. She’s first pregnant at 8 years old and during her lifetime she was pregnant a total of 16 times. This means, on average, she had a pregnancy every 2.5 years after she reached sexual maturity. The longest she went without a pregnancy was 5 years immediately following WWII. She died in September 28, 1963 at 48 years old and 74 feet in length, killed by a whaling vessel before whaling was outlawed in the United States in 1972. At this point, you may be asking, how do I know all this?? Like tree rings, whales have tissue that chronicles their lives from birth to death. But unlike tree rings, the whale tissue that does this is earwax! Come by to learn more about earwax, whales, and reproduction.

To learn more about Dani’s work, you can visit her website: https://danicrain.netlify.com/