A year and a half ago, neuroscientist Kamilla Souza got the call she'd been waiting for. A baby humpback whale was adrift just offshore, in the waters off southeastern Brazil. It had died — and she wanted its brain.
"It's like Alice in Wonderland," says Souza, the founder and scientific director of the Brazilian Neurobiodiversity Network. She riffs off the classic line "Give me the head!"
Souza has been fascinated by the brains of marine mammals ever since she was young. She says there's very little known about the brains of whales and dolphins living in the waters off Central and South America. But studying them can teach scientists about the inner workings of these animals — about their behavior and how they're adapted to living underwater.
By the time Souza and her colleagues from the Instituto Baleia Jubarte arrived on the scene by boat, the whale had washed ashore a tiny island — and they had a problem — they could only get so close without running aground.
"You look at the situation," she recalls, "and you say, 'OK, I need it. I'll get this one no matter what.' I didn't have time to think. You just have to go."
So Souza grabbed her scalpel and saw, and she swam to shore. Soaking wet, she got out her tools and managed to extract the fresh, intact brain from the recently deceased whale. She was elated.
"It was the first extraction of a whale brain here in Brazil," she says proudly.
She then swam back to the boat with the brain nestled in a protective container.
Souza brought it back to her lab where it joined the ranks of what she says has become the largest collection of whale and dolphin brains in all of Latin America.
A race against time
Inside the necropsy room, a couple of veterinarians sharpen their knives to dissect another dolphin that recently stranded nearby. A parade of organs appears on the table to be measured and photographed — the heart, a kidney, the uterus.
Souza walks around to the head. "So here we have the skull," she observes. But, she says, "there is no brain." That's because it's basically liquefied.
The heat in this area of Brazil accelerates decomposition, so minutes matter. This is why sometimes, Souza has to extract the brain from a freshly deceased animal right on the beach. "We have to deal with people, animals, the weather," she says with a laugh. "Sometimes it's raining."
Souza is relentless, says Daniela Teles, one of the Orca Institute veterinarians. "Kamilla can find the treasure that is hidden inside all of this flesh and carcass and smell," she says. "She finds the brain and studies it. And it's amazing."
A fridge filled with brains
Souza opens up a normal-looking refrigerator in her office to show off a few of those treasures. She has a brain from a pygmy sperm whale, various dolphin species and more. She takes the lid off the largest plastic container to lift a hefty-looking brain out of the liquid preservative. It's from that baby humpback she swam ashore to dissect and it's twice the size of a human brain.
"So this brain is huge," Souza says with admiration. "I need the two hands to hold this brain."
There before her is, arguably, she says, the convoluted essence of a humpback whale — the thing that lets it swim and sing and so much more.
Given her international training, her access to understudied species, and all she's accomplished, Souza says she'd likely be able to work abroad. "But I'm here because I want to be," she says. "I want to do this kind of research here. My idea is to cover as much of the Brazilian coast as I can. I want to bring this knowledge to Brazil. I want to inspire Brazilian people to do something new, to do something special."
One of those people is Heitor Mynssen, Souza's Ph.D. student. He's developing a computer tool to model a variety of cetacean brains in 3D. He, too, wants to contribute to the field from here. "We don't have to always rely on other countries," he says. "We can actually do it on our own, and show the world that we can actually do good science. Being able to be a scientist in Brazil, it feels like part of me."
João Marcelo Ramos Nogueira, the executive director of the Orca Institute, is delighted to have Souza on his team. "Once Kamilla came in," he says, "we had the possibility to expand the analysis and [do] more research."
When Souza gets the chance to look out at the ocean and consider the trajectory that brought her to this moment, she says, "I think that I did the right thing because I'm super happy with my work and with the things that I'm doing for my country and for me as a researcher."
Souza says she has no doubt that the child she used to be would be happy with where she ended up.
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