Print ThisRebuilding Big Blue
The whale recovery team has included veterinary students, pathologists, naturalists, biologists, cooks, engineers, carpenters, heavy-equipment operators, and knife-sharpeners.
by Andrew Trites
You can smell her long before you see her. But a good, long bath — say six to eight months — should clear up the stench.
The blue whale, nicknamed Big Blue, washed up on a Prince Edward Island beach. Her bones crossed the continent to Victoria, British Columbia, for a specially designed enzyme bath, “drawn” by biologist Mike deRoos. It’s his job to get rid of the stinky, rancid oil that makes up about a third of the bones’ weight. Then deRoos gets to put the skeleton of the largest creature to ever live on Earth back together.
In the Beginning
For Big Blue, time is no problem. After all, it took 20 years for someone to take on the overwhelming task of digging her up.
In 1987, the dead female blue whale washed up near Nail Pond, in the northwestern corner of PEI. Scientists from the Canadian Museum of Nature wanted to save the massive mammal for future research and display so they buried her in sandy soil above the beach to preserve her, intending to come back for her one day. But how do you dig up, clean, transport, and display a whale the length of two city buses?
Andrew Trites with a shoulder bone.
by Jude Isabella
Enter Andrew Trites, a marine mammal specialist seeking skeletons to showcase in the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, scheduled to open at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in fall 2009.
“We wanted to find the biggest skeleton possible — and that’s the blue whale,” Dr. Trites says. During his quest for the supersized skeleton, the scientist happened to visit the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, where he joked with a curator: “I said, ‘You don’t happen to have an extra blue whale lying around, do you?’ The curator said, ‘Well, as a matter of fact…’ ”
Thus began The Blue Whale Project, the biggest project — literally — of Dr. Trites’s career. He flew to PEI in December 2007 to find the whale (see sidebar, “On the Trail of a Whale”). A hand-drawn map helped him pinpoint the beast. He returned in May, with over 10 colleagues to dig the carcass from its sandy storage place.
Packaging a Stale Whale
To unearth the whale, clean the flesh from its bones, dismantle the skeleton, and pack it on a 16-metre-long refrigerator container, the team started at the end, the tail. They began the dig with an excavator, then used shovels. After that, pathologists armed with knives jumped into the pit.
“These guys slice and dice in no time,” says Dr. Trites. “They know where every bone and joint is. They were covered from head to toe in whale slime. The dirtier they got, the bigger their smiles were.”
The biggest blue whale bone — and, therefore, the biggest bone on the planet — is the 7.6-metre-long jawbone. It weighs about 550 kg.
by Jude Isabella
For 11 days, the guck-covered crew worked on Big Blue, reeling from the stench. As they dismantled the skeleton, they labelled each bone, measured the distances between bones, and charted the location of each of the 200-plus bones to make it easier for deRoos to rebuild the whale.
You Can’t Mail a Whale
Thanks to a whale of a refrigerated storage container donated by CN Rail to The Blue Whale Project, the stinky skeleton pieces arrived safely on the West Coast.
Before immersing Big Blue in the specially designed tank donated by Ellice Recycling in Victoria, deRoos and his crew did some prep work. DeRoos stood next to the whale’s limousine-length jawbone as a volunteer, his dad, burrowed into the bone with a drill. The holes will allow some oil to drain from the bone.
The result will be Canada’s first blue whale skeleton, and only the fifth in North America. Worldwide, about 20 blue whale skeletons are on display. To get one takes luck. (Bad luck for the whale!)
“She was probably hit by a ship,” deRoos explains. “The left side of her skull is crushed. And there are quite a few broken bones from when she was buried — whale skeletons are not designed to be out of the water.” Which is why the jawbone is also cut in half lengthwise — deRoos will put Big Blue back together with a steel framework hidden inside for support.
Volunteers drill into the whale bone.
by Jude Isabella
Including the bath, how long will the whole process take? “About two years,” deRoos says. You know what they say: big whale, big job.
SIDEBAR: On the Trail of a Whale
Big Blue, Canada’s first blue whale skeleton, was buried in a sand beach over 20 years ago.
“Nobody knew exactly where the whale was or what state it was in,” explains Andrew Trites, a marine mammal specialist at UBC. But that didn’t stop Dr. Trites and his colleagues, who flew to Prince Edward Island to find Ms. Balaenoptera musculus.
There, the team linked up with a conservation officer who had a hand-drawn “treasure map” of the beach in question. When she led the researchers to a likely location, they dug a few test holes. As it turned out, X marked the exact spot. “The entire whale was still there.”
Dr. Trites recalls standing on the back of this smelly blue whale on the beach in December 2007 and thinking: What have I gotten myself into?
“I was in total shock and disbelief. I thought we would find perfectly white, clean bones.” Instead, he and his colleagues found a mummified whale — complete with skin, muscle, and blubber. “It really was overwhelming to see how large this animal actually was,” he says.