Last Friday, a blue-whale carcass washed up on the shores of Trout River, Newfoundland (population: six hundred). In short order, it has become famous on the Internet as the “exploding whale”—though it has not, as yet, exploded. Nor, despite our fervent desire for spectacle, is it likely to. For a while, the eighty-foot corpse had expanded to twice its living size, bloated with foul-smelling ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, and methane gases produced by bacteria on a feeding frenzy. The pressure of the expanding gas might have continued to build, turning the former whale into an increasingly stressed balloon full of blubber and guts. But, anticlimax: Trout River’s town clerk, though still sounding harried by this unwanted arrival on her shores, told CTV that the carcass had “deflated” a bit. Don Bradshaw, a journalist in Newfoundland, tweeted a photo on Thursday showing that the whale had shrunken considerably. A scientist at Fisheries and Oceans Canada downplayed the danger of a whale bomb, though he suggested, nonetheless, that people might want to stop climbing on it.
The idea of spontaneous combustion is certainly compelling, but the truth of the matter is that history’s famous exploding whales had a little help from humans. A whale blew up last year in the Faroe Islands, but only after a seam had been cut by a researcher, who just managed to dodge the gooey shrapnel. Another whale, which showered the streets of the Tawainese city of Tainan in a mess of innards in 2004, was being transported on the back of a truck when it burst. And the most famous exploding whale in history went sky-high thanks to some inventive, if ill-considered, meddling. In 1970, members of the Oregon Highway Division rigged up a dead beached whale with dynamite in an attempt to obliterate it. But it turned out that they were low on firepower, and so, rather than blasting the body into tiny bits of seagull food, they instead sprayed huge chunks of whale over a crowd of people across a wide radius. Thankfully, there was a television crew on hand to capture the full arc of the scene—from hopeful preparation to grim postmortem. Onlookers fled the dunes. An Oldsmobile was flattened. Nobody died. The seagulls never arrived for their dinner.
On Thursday, the Canadian government announced that the Royal Ontario Museum had agreed to handle the removal of the carcass from Trout River. It would also take a second, less-famous, but still burdensome blue-whale body that came ashore just up the coast, in the town of Rocky Harbour. The museum wants the skeletons, and plans to send a team of ten people to retrieve them. A museum official told CTV that the bones will be cut out of the bodies with long flensing knives, and then trucked across Canada in big rigs. The blubber and other remains, meanwhile, will be transported to a landfill. The process could take two weeks.
In the United States, six hundred and forty-eight stranded whales (living and dead) were reported between 2008 and 2013, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fisheries service. Seven of those were blue whales, which are the biggest animals ever known to have lived on the planet. To get a sense of how the U.S. deals with dead whales, I spoke to Sarah Wilkin, a biologist with NOAA’s Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Response Program. She laid out several options:
Leave it there. This is the best plan, according to Wilkin, in secluded areas, where the smell of a decomposing whale is less likely to bother people, and on protected park land, where people can be kept away and scavengers are abundant. There is also a chance that wave action, or high water from a storm, could take the carcass out to sea.
Bury it. This method requires serious digging, but, if the whale is accessible, it is tidy, and requires little transportation. (It also lessens the chances of a Taiwan-style whale explosion on the road.) Wilkin said that a trench needs to be dug at least a few meters deeper than the height of the whale, in order to keep the carcass from resurfacing. Burial is also good for grave robbers—in this case, researchers—who can return to the site after as little as a year to dig up a clean skeleton.
Chop it up and truck it away. This involves a messy onsite disarticulation of the whale, and requires heavy-duty trucks equipped with a crane (see this sperm-whale removal in Uruguay), but is sometimes necessary if the ground isn’t suitable for burial. The whale, once a titan of the sea, decomposes at some remote inland location, or else in a landfill.
Float it out and sink it. If a dead whale can be reached from the water and hooked by lines, the best option is often to tow it back out to sea and then to sink it to the bottom of the ocean. To overcome buoyancy, the body is weighed down, most often with metal. Frequently, the body cavity is filled with heavy material—scrap metal, heavy chains, train wheels. NOAA won’t allow a whale that has been chemically euthanized to be returned to the ocean because it may pose a risk to other animals. Otherwise, sinking a dead animal is a natural choice. “We have no problem returning a carcass to the bottom of the ocean—it came from the ocean and would be there anyway,” Wilkin said. It sure beats a landfill. And, in death, the body can even help to support other life—whole colonies of invertebrates are known to make a home among the remains.
NOAA coordinates more than a hundred response teams across the country, which either assist in the disposal or offer advice. As is true in Canada, the financial responsibility for the removal of washed-up whales falls to the municipality where they lie. Trout River officials were balking at the cost before the Royal Ontario Museum stepped in to help. And so small towns along the coasts live in fear of the day when an eighty-foot creature washes up on the beach. It’s like Jaws showing up on Amity Island, if Jaws were a giant tube of rotting flesh that takes more than a year to decompose, and smells awful while doing it. Whale spooks probably don’t make the best tourists.
But what about explosions? I asked Wilkin if NOAA ever considered detonation as a removal technique. Referring to Oregon, 1970, she said, “I think that experience showed, at least in the way that it was carried out, that it is not a good option.”
Photograph by Colin Stinson/Demotix/Corbis.