porpoise
Associate Professor Karen Stockin and her team from the Cetacean Ecology Research Group (CERG) at Massey University were relieved to take delivery of their new 20ft walk in freezer last week to safely store the largest marine mammal tissue archive in the southern hemisphere.
The new container freezer now houses over 12,000 tissues representing more than 25 cetacean (whale and dolphin) species sampled from around New Zealand and beyond since the early 1990s.
The archive contains various tissue types including liver, kidney, heart, muscle, gonads, stomach contents and teeth from all manner of coastal and oceanic dolphins through to pelagic beaked and migratory baleen whales.