{"id":358775,"date":"2025-12-19T18:14:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-19T18:14:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/358775\/"},"modified":"2025-12-19T18:14:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T18:14:08","slug":"drones-detect-deadly-virus-in-arctic-whales-breath-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/358775\/","title":{"rendered":"Drones detect deadly virus in Arctic whales&#8217; breath"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The researchers used drones carrying sterile petri dishes to capture droplets from the exhaled breath of humpback, fin and sperm whales, combined with skin biopsies taken from boats.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">They confirmed for the first time that a potentially deadly whale virus, known as cetacean morbillivirus, is circulating above the Arctic Circle.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The disease is highly contagious and spreads easily among dolphins, whales, and porpoises causing severe disease and mass deaths.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">It can jump between species and travel across oceans, posing a significant threat to marine mammals.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The researchers hope this breakthrough will help spot deadly threats to ocean life early, before they start to spread.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The researchers used drones carrying sterile petri dishes to capture droplets from the exhaled breath of humpback, fin&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":358776,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[64,63,128,338],"class_list":["post-358775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=358775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358775\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/358776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=358775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=358775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=358775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}