Backward-finned dolphin: This dolphin's fin seems to be on backward. Matt Leslie is trying to figure out why.
Image: Robert L. Pitman NOAA-NMFS-PRD
-
Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?
Why do testicles hang the way they do? Is there an adaptive function to the female orgasm? What does it feel like to want to kill yourself? Does “free will”...
Read More »
No, it's not photoshopped—that dolphin's fin really is on backward. It is a type of spinner dolphin that lives in the eastern tropical Pacific. The really peculiar thing about these cetaceans is that only the adult males have backward fins. The juveniles and females of the species look completely normal.
"We've known about these dolphins for 50 years," says Matt Leslie, a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, "but not a lot has been done to actually study why it's on backwards."
To figure out what's going on, Leslie wants to build models of these dolphins and put them into a flow tank. By looking at how the water moves over the models, researchers can study how the fin might affect the dolphins' swimming capabilities. Because the funky fin only occurs in adult males, the hunch is that it has to do with appealing to female preferences, rather than making the dolphin a more efficient swimmer.
But this research is only tangentially related to Leslie's PhD work, and it is not a question that big funding agencies are terribly interested in. So to get money for the CT scans he needs to build the models, Leslie has turned to a new funding source: crowds. His research project is one of 49 projects in the SciFund Challenge, an experiment in crowdsourcing for research funding.
SciFund is the brainchild of two researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who thought that crowdsourcing for science projects could help bridge the gap between scientists and the rest of the world. "My vision for the future is that every scientist has a public face, where they're updating people about their science and people can directly connect to it," co-founder Jai Ranganathan says. He hopes that if people can see and fund projects, they'll be more connected to the science.
To reach a bigger audience, SciFund has teamed up with RocketHub, a more general-topic crowdsourcing site that connects projects with people. RocketHub co-founder Brian Meece was initially skeptical of how well crowdsourcing would work for science, but since teaming up with SciFund he's seen several projects go well beyond their expected fundraising goals. "We're seeing this model that's been so successful in the world of arts hold up exceptionally well in the world of science," he says.
And for Leslie, the benefit is twofold: His project could get funded, and he can connect more easily with the public about his work. "I see this initiative as an excellent way to do both funding for a nontraditional science project, but also for outreach and getting people excited," he says.
The projects on the SciFund site are generally small, compared with those typically funded by agencies such as the National Science Foundation or the American Association for the Advancement of Science. But Ranganathan and Meece think researchers could start to fund more ambitious projects using crowds. "It's really a brand new model," Meece says, "so I think the future is very bright."
Ranganathan says that for him, it's less about the cash and more about the outreach. People who donate to a project feel a sense of ownership and excitement about that research, he says. And anyone who donates money to a project on RocketHub, gets something from that project in return, whether it's photographs from the field, a mention in a paper published in a journal or, in the case of Leslie's project, a clay model of a backward dolphin fin. "Obviously I'd have to draw or carve an arrow for the right direction," he says, laughing.
See what we're tweeting about
4 Comments
Add Comment"bgrtegf yhityuwerew gh fgurwe dgf ygu erew"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell, that goes without saying...
Nice spam there buddy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUm, how do just the adult males have backwards fins? It reads like they're born with normal fins, and then when they reach the age of adulthood it just turns around. Wtf? Someone has to record a video of this fin flipping and put it on YouTube. I must see it.
Actually, the pictured dolphin's fin is not backward....it's head is on the wrong end.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@nuiun: Thanks for your questions. You are absolutely right that they are born with normal back-canted fins. However, once the males reach maturity the fin start to cant forward, and first become straight up, then forward-canted as they become older. We don't know exactly how this happens physiologically, but we think it is a function of the trailing edge of the fin continuing to grow after the leading edge has stopped. We'd love to do some gene expression studies and hormone assays of the different tissues in the next round of research, but that will be a few years down the line.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCheck out more about the project - and be sure to donate - every little bit helps!
http://www.rockethub.com/projects/3754-why-is-this-dolphin-s-fin-on-backwards
Thanks for the comments and Q's! Keep'em coming!