Last May the carcass of a ten-foot-long, 500-pound white-beaked dolphin washed up on the shores of Vinalhaven. My neighbor Drew Noyes had told me about it, so Lucy McCarthy, Field Guide to Marine Mammals in hand, and I followed our noses down to the bay to take a look.
There it was. I could see it had once been robust with bold patterns of black and white but, now surrounded by an olfactory aura, it was being eyed by ravens. Referring to the field guide, we considered its length, the shape and position of its dorsal fin and counted the almost 100 teeth. It was a white-beaked dolphin.
Right away I imagined a great project for the North Haven Community School, where I work (WWF July 2004). We could dissect out and clean the skeleton of this once magnificent animal and fasten the bones back together again. Then we would have it for everyone to appreciate. With the help of Nathan Haskell and student Emmett Hodder, both of North Haven, we towed this deceased cetacean under the carrying place bridge and across to North Haven, turned it over it to the National Marine Fisheries Service, which delivered it to Allied Whale.
Allied Whale is a marine mammal research and rescue organization at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor. It performed the level 1 necropsy, making measurements and assessing the condition of the animal when it died and looking for the cause of death. It was emaciated, they found, but they weren’t able to pinpoint a cause of death. It was a male and its rows of once sharp teeth showed much wear, suggesting that it was probably an older individual.
The white-beaked dolphin’s natural range is in deeper water, on the offshore shelf, stretching from Nova Scotia north into the ice-free regions of the Arctic and east by southern Greenland, beyond Iceland to the waters off northern Europe. Its diet can include a variety of ocean-going animals but it feeds mostly on squid. Sometimes, it’s called the squid hound. Our dolphin was found to have squid in its stomach.
When September came, we were ready to retrieve our dolphin bones. I traveled to Bar Harbor with seven North Haven students who had signed up for Studies in Cetology: Mike Weber, Celina Beverage, Jesse Davisson, Ansel Orne, Jamie Lane, Ben Lovell and Emmett Hodder; and also Ben Neal and Ruth Kermish-Allen of the Island Institute. While making this trip to the College of the Atlantic, we visited the Whale Museum and COA’s natural history museum. The thoughtfully done taxidermy and articulated whale skeletons we saw were the inspiration we required to work with our own dolphin’s bones, now still dripping with putrid meat and fat.
We set up our try works behind the North Haven School. I had some old 50-gallon honey barrels from previous adventures in biology. One of those, cut in half and set up on cement blocks over an old burner used for melting beeswax, became our cooker. Flukes and flames! Flames and flukes! Boiling blubber! What a smell!
A day in the boiler does a pretty good job of ridding the bones of the attached meat, fat, ligaments and tendons. To forestall the problem of whether this bone should be connected to that bone, we came up with systems of tagging and photographing the bones so that we would be able to put them together in their correct positions later on. We even went to the Island Community Medical Center in Vinalhaven and got an x-ray of one of the flippers, giving us a nice map of those tricky carpal bones.
The next step was the bleaching of the bones with concentrated hydrogen peroxide. They’ve come out looking nice and clean and smelling sweet.
Now, to put them together!
North Haven vocational arts teacher Terry Goodhue, an employee of Region 8, has been awarded an Island Institute Marine Stewards Fellowship, and expects to finish the whale rearticulation during the spring.