ArticleScientific reports2020
Respiratory microbiota of humpback whales may be reduced in diversity and richness the longer they fast.
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 24 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Microbial and small zooplankton communities predict density of baleen whales in the southern California Current Ecosystem.PloS one · 2026Article
- Deep breath out: molecular survey of selected pathogens in blow and skin biopsies from North Atlantic cetaceans.BMC veterinary research · 2025Article
- Respiratory microbiomes reflect whale health.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Long-distance movement dynamics shape host microbiome richness and turnover.FEMS microbiology ecology · 2024Article
- Review
- Microbiome differences between wild and aquarium whitespotted eagle rays (Aetobatus narinari).Animal microbiome · 2022Article
- Bacterial microbiomes from mucus and breath of southern resident killer whales (Conservation physiology · 2022Article
- Highly abundant core taxa in the blow within and across captive bottlenose dolphins provide evidence for a temporally stable airway microbiota.BMC microbiology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humpback whales endure several months of fasting while undertaking one of the longest annual migrations of any mammal, which depletes the whales' energy stores and likely compromises their physiological state. Airway microbiota are linked to respiratory health in mammals. To illuminate the dynamics of airway microbiota in a physiologically challenged mammal, we investigated the bacterial communities in the blow of East Australian humpback whales at two stages of their migration: at the beginning (n = 20) and several months into their migration (n = 20), using barcoded tag sequencing of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene. We show that early in the fasting the whale blow samples had a higher diversity and richness combined with a larger number of core taxa and a different bacterial composition than later in the fasting. This study provides some evidence that the rich blow microbiota at the beginning of their fasting might reflect the whales' uncompromised physiology and that changes in the microbiota occur during the whales' migration.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.