What do you do when a 60-tonne whale carcass washes ashore? If you’re Nova Scotia researchers, you get to work

The first thing that hits you is the smell.

It’s an implausible fishy-gamey smell, by times light and occasionally cloying.

It’s a smell you should get used to — it’s going to stay with you. It will infiltrate your clothing, your hair, your skin and — most inconveniently — your memories. So much so that later, freshly scrubbed, looking at your photographs, that smell will reappear to haunt your nostrils.

The source of that smell is, incongruously, magnificent.

Up ahead, pulled up from the ocean shoreline, are the remains of a blue whale; as a species, the largest creatures ever known to exist on this planet. The biggest of this endangered species can grow as long as 33 metres and weigh up to 190 tonnes — slightly shorter than the space shuttle, and the weight of eight school buses.

This particular blue whale was more modest — a recently matured female, likely about 10 to 15 years old, 25 metres long and probably weighing around 60 tonnes.

It’s believed she washed ashore overnight on Sept. 8 as a storm lashed the eastern coast of Nova Scotia, finally coming to rest on a nudist beach about 30 kilometres south of Halifax.

Swarming over her now is a team of hip wader-wearing, knife-wielding biologists and volunteers in the process of answering the burning question: What do you do when 60 tonnes of whale washes up dead on one of your beaches?

If you’re Danielle Pinder, you’re probably the first one on the scene.

She’s a response co-ordinator for the Marine Animal Response Society (MARS), a non-profit conservationist organization that’s usually the first response to reports of marine mammals in distress in the Maritimes. Those incidents may involve animals entangled in nets or wounded or stranded on beaches, perhaps still alive, and sometimes — as in this case — dead.

Over the years, this is the third blue whale carcass Pinder has responded to — she’s never seen a live one. And while beached blue whales are relatively infrequent, sadly, the also-endangered northern right whale is a more common casualty. In 2015, 2017 and 2019, Pinder remembers, there were multiple whale carcasses washing up on Maritime shores. And that can take its toll on MARS staff and volunteers.

“Whenever we get the call, our hearts immediately sink,” she says.

“It’s really upsetting to hear that at first. And then you kind of switch into work mode and you say, ‘OK, what can we do to figure out what happened to it?’

“And then, after everything’s done, you kind of decompress a little bit. And it kind of hits you again, especially for some of our MARS people. They’ve been doing this for years. And sometimes, in the summer, when you’re on your fifth or sixth one of these for the right whales in particular, it’s mentally just devastating and it’s really hard to process all of that.”

In ideal cases — insomuch as dead whales can be considered ideal — MARS is able to do a necropsy. Their team, including their veterinarians, will carefully open the carcass, take samples for researchers and check for lesions, signs of bleeding or hemorrhaging, signs of disease or parasites, hopefully being able to determine the cause of death along the way.

In this case, with the storm bashing the whale carcass against the rocks, the damage was extensive enough that a necropsy was pointless. The options at that point are to tow the carcass out to sea to let the ocean and its scavengers take care of it, or to preserve the skeleton for museums and research.

Since a blue whale skeleton is a rare find, MARS works with other organizations — the province’s Department of Natural Resources, the federal DFO, and Research Casting International — to remove the skeleton and dispose of the flesh.

The first problem with this carcass, said Jason MacIntosh, area manager for the province’s Natural Resources department, was that the whale washed up on a remote beach, where heavy machinery couldn’t access it without disturbing a fragile ecosystem.

The solution was to tow the whale off the nudist beach and land it further down the coastline, where a nearby road could provide access to an excavator, which pulled the carcass off the beach to where it could be processed.

That endeavour did not come without its risks, MacIntosh explains.

“We were very worried about the whale breaking apart,” he said. “But one of the biologists that was on site made a determination that the whale was still structurally sound. In fact, they felt very confident that if we strapped it by the tail, it would not pull apart.”

Once the carcass is relocated, the aforementioned swarm of biologists and volunteers gets to work. Using only knives — power tools are too dangerous and get gunked up quickly — they begin to separate flesh from bone.

It’s hard and sweaty work; each of them is covered from feet to elbows in whale remains, and the flesh is tough enough that the knives they use only last 10 to 15 minutes before they must be sharpened again.

But the fruits of their labour emerge: a set of vertebrae here, part of the jaw there, some ribs over there. As each bone is exposed, an excavator lifts mounds of flesh from the carcass and stacks it to the side, there to be later loaded into a dump truck and taken to a burial site.

Once separated and cleaned as much as possible, the bones fall into the hands of Research Casting International, based in Trenton, Ont., whose specialty is putting together exhibits for museums all over the world. They’re responsible for the three skeletons installed at the ROM this summer, and the whale skeleton at Memorial University in Newfoundland, among others.

They have a museum interested in this particular blue whale skeleton, says general manager Matt Fair, but he’s not able to say which one just yet.

First, though, those bones have to be cleaned, and the way to do that is to bury them in a compost of manure and sawdust — which includes a species of dermestid beetle — in an oxygen-rich environment. There, over the course of a year, the remaining flesh is removed.

Then there’s a pressure wash and a degreaser to try and remove the remaining oils in the bones. After a final wash, the skeleton is ready to be sent to its new home.

This process is old hat for Fair — this is the 13th whale he’s collected, and his fourth blue whale. But this one came with something he hadn’t seen before.

Before the cleaning of the carcass began, he and the other workers joined in a ceremony with Mi’kmaq First Nation’s Angela Swan.

“They did a smudging around the whale, and that was to send the spirit of the whale back to the Creator,” he said.

“It was a moving ceremony and at the end, an eagle flew over and then it landed. And then a second eagle came and flew over the carcass, and then both eagles picked up, flew over once more and went away.

“They feel that was part of the spirit leaving and the eagle carrying it to the Creator.

“That is something that I think is the most amazing thing about this particular job.”