Molly Webster

You, Molly.

Okay.

So yeah.

So Lucy hopped on a plane.

And then to get to the patch of the ocean north of Seattle where the whales actually live.

But the actual reason Lucy was there was to get on a boat.

with a woman named Deborah Giles.

Apparently you can learn a lot about whales by looking at their poop.

Hormones, microbes, environmental chemicals.

So what they do is they go out in the boat until they spot this group of killer whales.

And then...

Does the whale poop float at the surface?

Yes.

And then they just lean over the side of the boat with this plastic lab vial on the end of a stick.

So the reason Lucy went to visit Giles and these whales is because the scientists who study them had noticed something odd.

When they got to be around like 40 or so, the female whales just stopped having babies, even though they lived to be 70, 80, even like 100 years old.

At first, the scientists thought they were having miscarriages, maybe, or there was some kind of pollutant in the water or something that was causing these older females to stop having babies.

But in 2017, Giles and this colleague of hers, Sam Wasser, published a poop analysis that confirmed a very different hypothesis that people had been considering for a couple decades.

They wrote, and I quote here, the females in the population have undergone reproductive senescence.

Oh, senescence.