When whales and dolphins dive, they move their tail up and down in an undulating manner, which creates surges in blood pressure.
Called retia mirabilia, which means “wonderful nets,” the blood vessel networks are present in some other animals besides cetaceans, including giraffes and horses. But the networks aren’t found in other aquatic vertebrates that move differently from whales, such as seals. So scientists had suspected that the cetaceans’ retia mirabilia play a role in controlling blood pressure surges.
. Without a way to relieve that pressure, those blasts could tear blood vessels and harm other organs, including the brain. Like other cetaceans, beluga whales have dense, intricate webs of blood vessels that protect the animals’ brains during diving, a new study finds.The networks “equalize the [blood flow] in a way that you never lose that blood that’s in the vein and it doesn’t collapse down on itself, and you don’t have that shooting arterial blood going really fast into the brain,” says marine biologist Tiffany Keenan of the University of North Carolina Wilmington who was not involved in the study.
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