Love transcends the earth of giants

Minke whales in the Arctic and Antarctica are two separate species and live in the two hemispheres of the earth, but for some reason they mate with each other and produce offspring.

National Geographic said that the two species of minke whales in the Arctic and Antarctic - all have a maximum body length of 11 m - have a completely opposite seasonal seasonal behavior. Arctic whales migrate to the north pole in the spring and reach the ice shelves in the Arctic Ocean in summer. In the autumn, they swim south to reach the water near the equator in winter.

In contrast, the South Pole minke whales approach the south pole in the spring and reaches the ice seams in the summer. In the fall, they swim north to reach the water near the equator in winter.

But because the seasons in the two hemispheres are completely opposite, the two whales cannot go to the water near the equator at a time. Therefore, in theory they never meet.

The people who hunt whales in a great way from the 1930s and some countries continue to hunt them down today, like Norway and Japan.

Norway once banned whale hunting for a short time, but the country issued a permit back in 1993. To control the license, Norway requested fishing boats to submit DNA samples of the whales they killed. . The DNA database is also the basis for the government to certify products from elephants of legal origin.

Kevin Glover, a geneticist, heard an interesting story that happened in 1996. A scientist saw a strange minke whale standing on a ship in the northern Atlantic Ocean.

" The whale does not have a white mark on the pectoral fins like the Arctic whale ," National Geographic quoted Glover.

Glover decided to explore the facts based on the Norwegian government's data warehouse. He discovered that a Arctic whale was killed in the northeastern Atlantic in 2007 born by an Antarctic whale. After analyzing the DNA of a minke whale captured in the northern Atlantic region in 1996. The result stunned him, because it was an Antarctic whale.

Glover's findings show that Antarctic whales can migrate into the waters that Arctic whales live. They even mate with Arctic whales.

Many questions are raised. Is mating between Arctic and Antarctic whales a rare coincidence, or the beginning of a trend? No one knows the answer, but Nils Oien, a whale biologist and colleague of Glovers, offers an interesting hypothesis.

Studies in Japan show that the number of Antarctic whales in the southern hemisphere plummeted in the 80s and 90s. Results of some surveys indicate that the number of krill that can be eaten by whales also decreased during that period.

" Even a study has demonstrated that the fat in the Antarctic whale body is also thinner because of the reduced food intake. So we speculate the number of mollusks and some other whales' food. The Antarctic reduced, so they were forced to migrate further to find food, and during the residual process some of them went to the North Pole, "Oien said.