How exactly does one strip a blue whale down to the bone? How can the largest animal that ever lived be turned into a museum display?
With some knives, some heavy machinery, and a strong stomach, among other things.
Last week, a team from the Royal Ontario Museum travelled to Trout River, N.L. to dissect the dead 23-m long blue whale that washed ashore last month. They were joined by Sean McShane, correspondent for the Daily Planet, for the first day of dissecting.
McShane described the scene as a giant “butcher shop.”
“It was pretty disgusting,” he said. “Just being there was pretty crazy, and then obviously cutting into it was just something over and above. The smell was just unreal.”
The whale had been decomposing in the sun for weeks, so it wasn’t in very good shape. One of its flippers had been cut off, and there were several cuts in its body. After it washed ashore the whale was severely bloated, but when it came to do the dissecting, much of the gas inside had dissipated, deflating the whale.
It was a seriously stinky, week-long affair that involved a few different stages.
Stage 1: Removing the blubber
McShane said he was given a few initial instructions about how to make cuts into the whale, but otherwise he was told to “just go.”
Equipped with basically a long kitchen knife – called a flensing knife, which was used historically by whalers to remove blubber – he helped carve the dead whale meat into manageable pieces.
“We’d be carrying these massive 100-pound chucks of blubber over to the bucket in a front-end loader,” he said.
Larger strips of blubber would be tied to the front-end loader, which would back up, peeling off the meat.
“Almost like a banana, really,” McShane said.
Stage 2: Remove the tissue beneath the blubber
Beneath the blubber were muscle, tendons, guts, and the connective tissue that held the whale’s skeleton and musculature together.
All this had to be cut up, and then piled into the bucket of the front-end loader with the blubber. The whale weighed over 100 tonnes, translating into thousands of pounds of flesh and blubber.
The front-lend loader would then empty the bucket into a dump truck, which would take the piles of putrid meat away to a land-fill.
McShane was tasked with a particularly nasty part of the project: slicing into the whale’s gut cavity. He wasn’t so sure about it, having seen videos of dead whales exploding with gas, popping like balloons.
“I was a little hesitant for sure. I got a bit of a bloodbath, it just poured on my leg. It was a waterfall of blood.”
The smell was horrific – a camera man tried to catch a shot of McShane throwing up, but had to retreat when he too began gagging. After the ordeal, McShane had to throw away the clothes he wore.
Eddie Samms works to cut up the carcass of a blue whale in Woody Point, N.L., on Sunday, May 11, 2014. (THE CANADIAN PRESS / Paul Daly)
Stage 3: Detaching the bones
The team had to gouge out the connective tissue between the bones, separating them into individual pieces and stripping them of any remaining meat.
The bones were then wrapped in plastic, and loaded onto a truck headed to Trenton, Ont., where they’ll undergo a number of treatments in preparation for going on display at the ROM.
Two trailers were needed to transport the blue whale’s skeleton, one for its skull – which is the size of a small speed boat – and another for the rest of the bones.
The skull was the last thing to be loaded onto a truck, a week after the dismantling began.
Stage 4: Prepping the bones for display
The skeleton will be buried in manure and soil for about a year to decompose any tissue that still remains.
Then, they’ll be soaked in water to be stripped of oil, which can take up two years. This step is very important, as any oil left behind will effectively rot the bones. If the bones are damaged, they will not be able to be displayed.
The ROM will announce if it will undertake the dissection of a second whale that washed ashore in Rocky Harbour, N.L., on Friday.
McShane will give a full report fn his day dissecting the whale this evening (Thursday the 15th) at 7 p.m. EST on the Discovery Channel.
