Reinventing the whale
Journey from rotting carcass to pristine ROM exhibit involved 385 cows, a dump truck and a toilet plunger
I will never forget my first encounter with the dead blue whale we would come to call Lollipop. The smell was so overpowering that it was an almost physical presence.
Newfoundland’s Bonne Bay sparkled deceptively in the May sunlight. As I tried to walk toward the whale, the stench of rotting blubber stopped me dead in my tracks, as if it were an invisible wall. I had to retreat and kneel beside my rental car until the urge to vomit passed. Finally, one of the guys working on the carcass yelled up at me. “You’ll have to come down here to get the interview,” he shouted. I got my act together.
It was the first day of the most disgusting, most fascinating week of my life.
Today, the skeleton of the blue whale will go on display at the Royal Ontario Museum. Transforming 90 tonnes of de- composing carcass into a camera-ready exhibit required nearly three years of extremely unusual preparation methods.
The museum’s curators and scientists hope the animal will be able to tell a story about one of evolution’s most radical and exquisite specimens, and the troubling questions that remain about the whale’s living brethren.
By the time I got to Bonne Bay in May 2014, the whale was already worldfamous. The carcass had drifted to shore in nearby Trout River, bloated with gases released by the decomposition process.
Residents fretted to the CBC: Could it explode, befouling the tiny town with chunks of rotting blubber? Tourism season was just around the corner.
The Internet went nuts: exploding whale videos are a potent genre on YouTube. A deep sea ecologist started a website, www.hasthewhaleexplodedyet.com. Twitter and Reddit users kept up a vigil.
Some biologists doubted whether it was ever likely to explode. Blue whales have very thick skin and a fat layer of blubber, so the internal gases would have to build to very high pressures for the carcass to explode. But it didn’t really matter — the public was enthralled.
Mark Engstrom, the ROM’s deputy director of collections and research, has wanted to mount an exhibit on Canada’s whales for more than a decade. He had already collected the skeletons of a humpback, fin, minke, sperm, right and killer whale. He was only missing a blue whale, “which is the one you have to have, because it is the largest animal that has ever lived and certainly the largest whale,” he says. The last time a blue whale carcass was stranded in an accessible location was over 25 years ago, in P.E.I. As soon as Engstrom heard that one had washed to shore in western Newfoundland, he arranged for permits from Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) to recover the skeleton and bring it back to Ontario.
If the exploding whale circus was comic, it was a small scene in a larger tragedy. Three dead blue whales washed onto the west coast of Newfoundland that spring. The internetfamous whale came to shore in Trout River. The ROM towed it to Woody Point, where it would be easier to work on. A second in Rocky Harbour was later collected by the ROM too. A third washed up near Bakers Brook.
A month earlier, DFO research scientist Jack Lawson, flying in a helicopter 60 kilometres off Cape Anguille in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, spotted nine dead blue whales stranded in ice. They were likely trapped and killed by fast-moving sea ice.
The death of nine animals is a staggering loss for the blue whales of the region. “This stranding event represented the removal of perhaps 4 per cent of mature individuals from this endangered population,” Lawson explains. After being decimated by commercial whaling, the species is listed as endangered globally. But while blue whales can be found in all oceans but the Arctic, smaller populations cluster together in different parts of the sea, even communicating with a distinctive vocabulary of acoustic calls.
The population that frequents the Canadian waters of the western North Atlantic appears to be distressed.
The Mingan Island Cetacean Study has been documenting blue whales in the Gulf of St. Lawrence for 39 years. In that time, they have spotted 23 calves. Across the sea, in the population of blue whales that frequents the eastern Atlantic from Iceland to the Azores, researchers have catalogued 22 calves in 19 years while spending far fewer observing hours each season. The Canadian blue whales seem to be struggling to procreate.
Many questions about the western North Atlantic blue whales remain unanswered. The Mingan Island researchers attached a satellite tag to one female, known as Symphonie. (Blue whales can be identified by distinctive pigmentation patterns on their skin, and Symphonie’s looks like musical notation.) Over the next six months, the tag broadcasted Symphonie’s movements as she travelled all the way down to the waters of the Carolinas. Symphonie is “quite a star,” says Richard Sears, the founder and director of the Mingan Island study. Normally satellite tags fall off within three or four weeks, and after that, we know little about where the whales go. “These animals can cover so much ground,” says Sears. Between sustained observation campaigns, chance sightings, and intermittent satellite tagging, “you’re piecing things together.”
The whale from Trout River was also a mature female, and she weighed more than 90 tonnes. At the boat ramp in Woody Point, the team began removing skin, blubber, and organs. The “flensing” — as stripping the skin and fat from whale bones is called — was going to be a gargantuan task.
The largest blue whale ever measured was 33 metres long, and the heaviest was an estimated 150 tonnes. One of the largest known dinosaurs, a Titanosaur, was 37 metres long, but researchers believe it only weighed 70 tonnes.
The ROM’s blue whale was approximately 23 metres, the same size as one of the TTC’s double-length articulated streetcars.
A significant expense in recovering the skeleton was renting heavy machinery to deal with the massive carcass: a front-end loader, an excavator to open up a landfill for the unwanted flesh, a dump truck to bring it there.
Aside from the skeleton, the scientists from the ROM were also hoping to collect samples: liver, kidney, ovary, baleen, and others. By analyzing these tissues, they hoped to resolve some of the mysteries of the western North Atlantic blue whale population. The baleen, sheets of hard keratin that make up the whale’s filterfeeding system, could be particularly revealing. By taking microscopic samples along the length of the baleen — from the newest near the gums to the oldest at the tip — they hoped to track changes in the whale’s diet, and perhaps even whether the whale had been pregnant, since it may record stores of reproductive hormones like progesterone.
With DNA samples from both the
The ROM’s blue whale was approximately 23 metres, the same size as one of the TTC’s double-length articulated streetcars
Trout River and Rocky Harbour animals, the ROM also wanted to produce the first fully-sequenced blue whale genomes. Genetic models let researchers peer back through the generations and see when there was lots of genetic diversity, indicating a large, healthy population, or restricted genetic diversity, indicating a small one.
The genomes will also reveal how much contact the western Atlantic population, with its very few calves, has with the seemingly healthier eastern one.
“If they’re all part of one big metapopulation — one larger population that interbreeds — that gives us a little bit more hope,” Engstrom says. All of the research is ongoing.
Aside from this careful sampling, the team spent most of the time knee-deep in rotting whale, or worse. We eventually nicknamed her Lollipop because of how her spine looked jutting out from her massive head.
As the bones emerged, they were tagged and set aside. Each vertebra was the size of a small child. The skull was enormous. The whale’s inner ear bone, which in humans is the size of a marble, was the size of a large mango.
By the seventh day, all the bones had been hauled onto trucks, which would arrive a few days later in Ontario.
The bones were bound for a warehouse in Trenton, the headquarters of Research Casting International. RCI, founded in1987 by Peter May, is a museum technical services company: it casts, mounts, fabricates and transports exhibits for museums around the world. Their 50,000square-foot warehouse is filled with casts of dinosaurs, machinery large and small, and science texts; classic rock is almost always playing in the background. Staff from RCI had helped dismantle the carcass in Newfoundland, and now the company was charged with preparing the skeleton for display — a challenge that relied on some unusual preparation methods.
In October, RCI staff buried all the bones of both whales — the Trout River and the Rocky Harbour animals — in shipping containers filled with manure. It took 385 of Prince Edward County’s finest dairy cows to produce enough manure for the task: eight triaxle dump truck loads. Bacteria in the manure would devour much of the organic matter remaining on the bones, saving humans the work. (The aerobic process would also require lots of oxygen and create lots of heat, so staff cut vents in the shipping containers.)
A year after the recovery in Newfoundland, a team of scientists and technicians met in Trenton and began to thaw a180 kilogram organ: the Rocky Harbour whale’s heart. The organs of that whale were much better preserved, maybe because it had been submerged in frigid water for longer. ROM staff have also had greater success recovering highquality DNA from this whale.
The whale’s heart is almost the size of a smart car, and the ROM decided to plastinate it for the exhibit. After the heart was slowly defrosted over the course of five days, the team, including two U.S. large mammal veterinarians, worked quickly to prepare the organ before it started to rot. They plugged the heart’s valves with “buckets, bottles, whatever fits. There’s a toilet plunger in one of them,” Jacqueline Miller, a ROM mammalogy technician, told me at the time. It wasn’t easy to find all the openings: whale heart anatomy is very different from ours. “It’s wider than tall, and flatter front to back, and symmetrical,” Miller says.
Once the heart was as tightly sealed as possible, they connected hoses to it and pumped it full of a formaldehyde solution, which arrests decomposition and stiffens the normally elastic muscle. Once fixed and shaped, the heart was shipped to a company in Germany that created the famous Body Worlds exhibits. In Germany, the heart spent months in a bath of acetone, dehydrating it. That emptied the cells of water, so they could be filled with polymer. The heart sat in a vat of silicone in a vacuum chamber for five months, slowly being impregnated with the plastic.
Soon the polymer will be cured, hardening the heart so it can be displayed. The ROM expects to add the heart to the exhibit this summer.
Between May and August of last year, the staff at RCI loaded the whale bones into two pools that the company bought and assembled inside their warehouse. They were real swimming pools designed to sit above ground in backyards; they were even lined with decorative mosaic tiles. A tarp was set up over the pools. Inside, the bones rested on a platform. A vapour degreaser continually circulated environmentally friendly detergents inside the tent, kind of like a dishwasher. This slow process was meant to leach any remaining oil from the bones.
The swimming pools were also used to prepare the whale’s baleen. Over many months, the sheets of baleen had dried and curled, developing white cuticle-like substance. So first they were power-washed, and then rehydrated in the pools. Once the sheets regained their flexibility, they were pressed and flattened between sheets of plywood. Finally, the bristles were groomed — to make them glossy, staff used a product de- signed for horses, Cowboy Magic Super Bodyshine.
Finally, starting at the end of last summer and continuing into this year, the bones began to be removed from the pools and sorted. Nearly three years after the whale washed to shore, the whale was ready to be reassembled into an exhibit.
The museum didn’t want to drill through the bones to mount them. So they welded a huge metal armature with cradle-like slots: seven for the cervical vertebrae near the whale’s head, 15 for the thoracic vertebrae, 14 for the lumbar vertebrae at the base of the whale’s spine, and 26 for the caudal vertebrae that make up the whale’s tail. (In humans, the caudal vertebrae are fused into a coccyx, or tailbone.)
Last week, the skeleton was taken apart again, loaded into trucks, and driven to the ROM.
The bones were brought into the exhibit space individually packaged in protective bubble-wrap and labelled.
The whale’s massive head got stuck in the hallway, and eventually just barely squeezed in through a loading door. The head is a cast; the original is still being treated in Trenton, and will be swapped in soon.
On Monday, with most of the skeleton assembled, RCI staff were adding the final pieces. They connected her pelvic bones, vestigial remnants from when whales were land-living animals with four legs. They repositioned her hyoid, a horseshoeshaped bone in the neck that in humans is about 4 centimetres wide but in the whale was bigger than my arm span. Her many finger-like phalanges would be added last.
Even after so many months of following the whale’s journey, seeing her immensity up close is staggering. (This effect is much easier to appreciate without the accompanying stench of putrid blubber, but for curious patrons with a strong stomach, Mark Engstrom’s watch will be on display: Its band absorbed the whale’s smell and still reeks nearly three years later.)
More than her size, I continue to be arrested by just how mammalian the whale is, from her finger-like forelimbs to her cavernous rib cage. The blue whale is an animal from the same branch of the evolutionary tree as humans, but exquisitely adapted to the sea and enormous — both a distant cousin and an ocean giant.