Dangling stockings reveal whales' sex drive

[Still Waters]

Using women's stockings to test a whale's sex drive: that's a joke, surely? In fact, the hosiery is key to a new method for measuring a whale's sex hormones without harming it – the first such method to be discovered.

For the first time, testosterone and progesterone – two key hormones that signal whether whales are pregnant, lactating or in the mood to mate – have been extracted from whales' lung mucus, captured in nylon stockings dangled from a pole over their blowholes as they surface to breathe.

This could allow non-invasive pregnancy tests on whales in the wild. Claims sometimes made for Japanese "scientific whaling" programmes that killing whales helps assess pregnancy rates would then become even more questionable.

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