Ecology: A Dead Whale and the Politics of Climate Change

Originally published in The Walrus. Read the full text here.

A museum struggles to tell the story of a species nearing extinction

Before she was famous, Blue was dead. In the spring of 2014, in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, a shift in the winds trapped a pod of blue whales under the ice, and she was one of nine to perish. In late April, her twenty-four-metre-long corpse washed up on the shore of Trout River, Newfoundland. When another member of her pod turned up at the nearby village of Rocky Harbour, internet rumours spread fear that the whales could spontaneously explode. The media erupted: “What Do We Do with This Whale?” (The New Yorker), “Could Whales Explode in Canadian Towns?” (cnn), and “Beached Dead Whale Stinks Up Town in Newfoundland,” (Associated Press). Saturday Night Live aired a hammy sketch about a beachside romance gone wrong: it begins with a ukulele ballad and ends in a mess of guts and blubber.

Mark Engstrom, a senior curator and deputy director at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum, had been working for fourteen years to build a collection of whales that inhabit Canadian waters. He already had the skeletons of a sperm whale and a humpback, but a blue whale—the world’s largest animal—would be the ultimate acquisition. On May 8, he and a group of technicians arrived in Newfoundland to harvest Blue’s bones with a set of specially made flensing knives. Engstrom’s work at the rom often requires him to wear a blazer, but he’s happiest when knee-deep in guts. “I’m a mammologist,” he says. “For me, this is the best part of the job.”

The rom team, dressed in chest waders, rain jackets, and heavy-duty rubber gloves, began cutting into Blue’s body, peeling back the skin, and removing layers of blubber, muscle, and innards. The team sent six truckloads of rotting flesh—which one curator referred to as “mushy, almost cheesy”—to a nearby dump, and packed the bones in shipping containers bound for Ontario.

This March, the rom will open Out of the Depths: The Blue Whale Story, featuring Blue’s preserved skeleton, which will later be joined by the world’s first plastinated blue whale heart. A successful museum exhibition needs both a compelling specimen and a strong story, and in Blue, Engstrom had both. Harvesting the hulking, distended body was one thing; telling its story is another. To do that, the curators confronted tricky questions—about delivering a message of conservation without being crassly political, and about the role of natural-history museums in our ecologically troubled moment.

Last september, at a warehouse in Trenton, Ontario, technicians dug up Blue’s bones (they had been buried in compost for a year so that bacteria would eat the remaining flesh) and subjected the specimens to detergent baths. Whale bones are difficult to clean: they’re as porous as sea sponges and as oily as hush puppies.

Nearby, a half-complete T. Rex skeleton looks pathetic relative to Blue’s. The whale’s vertebrae resemble the propellers of a cruise ship; her mandibles are like daggers that could slay Godzilla; and her skull, which requires a forklift and crane to move, is comparable in size and weight to a pickup truck. And the odour, even though the whale has been relieved of its flesh, is a dark animal musk—the smell of death writ large.

For more than a century, the curious were willing to brave that smell for the chance to get close to a cetacean. Whales were mythical creatures that also happened to exist. In 1903, in preparation for the St. Louis World’s Fair, workers from the Smithsonian travelled to Hermitage Bay, Newfoundland, to cast the body of a twenty-four-metre blue whale in plaster as it decomposed. In postwar Europe, thrill-seekers flocked to see Hercules, Goliath, and Jonah, three Norwegian fin whales casually preserved in formaldehyde and trucked from town to town. The tour ended when the bodies became too putrid to display.

Our eagerness to marvel at whales was rivalled only by our desire to kill them. In the nineteenth century, oil extracted from blubber lit lamps and greased hydraulic pumps, and their baleen plates lined corsets. By the early twentieth century, petroleum and polymers were making whale products obsolete. And yet, thanks to the exploding harpoon and the advent of faster ships, we’d finally figured out how to slaughter blue whales en masse—so we kept doing it.

The practice was catastrophic for the species. The global population of blue whales once numbered in the hundreds of thousands, but by 1966, when the International Whaling Commission introduced a hunting ban, it had been pushed to near extinction. “Next to the bison, there was never a bigger slaughter of a single species,” says Dave Ireland, managing director of biodiversity at the rom. In the northwest Atlantic, for a reason not yet identified, the blue whale population has fallen to roughly 200, and it isn’t growing. According to that estimate, the 2014 freeze in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence wiped out nearly 5 percent of an already imperilled population.

This is an excerpt. Read the full text here.