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from the next-up:-compare-top-tier-athletes dept.
Bajau people, an ethnic group of "sea nomads" in Southeast Asia, have evolved bigger spleens that aid their frequent diving activity:
In a striking example of natural selection, the Bajau people of South-East Asia have developed bigger spleens for diving, a study shows. The Bajau are traditionally nomadic and seafaring, and survive by collecting shellfish from the sea floor.
Scientists studying the effect of this lifestyle on their biology found their spleens were larger than those of related people from the region. The bigger spleen makes more oxygen available in their blood for diving. The researchers have published their results in the academic journal Cell [open, DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2018.03.054] [DX].
Located close to the stomach, the fist-sized spleen removes old cells from the blood and acts as a biological "scuba tank" during long dives.
The Bajau people live across the southern Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia and, according to rough estimates, number about one million people. "For possibly thousands of years, [they] have been living on house boats, travelling from place to place in the waters of South-East Asia and visiting land only occasionally. So everything they need, they get from the sea," first author Melissa Ilardo, from the University of Copenhagen, told the BBC's Inside Science programme.
Also at Scientific American and GEN.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Monday April 23 2018, @12:24PM (1 child)
I kind of agree. Get the best swimmers/free divers in the west, and compare.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @01:11PM
That is found in one of the links: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2012.00173/full [frontiersin.org]
The best divers had spleen volume near 540 cm^3 and the worst near 270 cm^3. You can see these are all much larger than what was seeh here. The Bajau had relatively small spleens, but the Najuan even smaller...
And how was this not cited? And why didn't they report the spleen sizes of their european cohort?
Also the spleen can grow or shrink due to illness/diet/environment, so taking a single measurement doesnt mean much. Perhaps the Bajau were just more stressed than the Najau when taking the CT scan since they were landsick? Also they make no mention of whether the person segmenting the CT images was blinded...So I dont even accept that comparison as representing any permanent or even real phenomenon.
Further, they collected no data on diving ability vs spleen size in these people, only implying that at least one person could go 200 ft deep. The world record is over 1000 ft, and Ive seen people claimed to get 200 ft after only a year of training, so these abilities are not superhuman either.
There are so many problems with this Bajau spleen paper I think it is a joke or a test.