The Current - The dirty work of preserving a blue whale skeleton

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

The bones of a massive blue whale will soon hang at Dalhousie University. Veterinarian Chris Harvey-Clark tells us what it took to salvage the whale that washed up outside Halifax, and what we still don't understand about the largest mammal on earth.

Whose take do you trust during this election cycle? I'm Rosemary Barton, CBC's chief political correspondent. At Issue is also where I listen and learn from the very best. Chantelle Bair, Andrew Coyne and Althea Raj. They are political heavyweights. They write and talk about politics for Canada's biggest publications and broadcasters, and they help shape the national conversation. So if you're looking for people who can connect the dots, cut through the spin,

check out the at issue podcast every week, wherever you listen. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is the current podcast. So this is a construction site down here. This is what you'll see as you come into the gallery and imagine that. Imagine being a little kid and never having seen a big whale before and bang you see that. Chris Harvey Clark finds it easy to imagine being a kid. It's wow, there's no other word for it. This is an impressive site. To think that creatures this big

are still alive on the planet. I mean bigger than a brontosaurus, bigger than a T-Rex. What Chris Harvey Clark is showing us here in Halifax is a dream. His team has just managed to hang a blue whale skeleton from the ceiling. It is now in the new Ocean Center at Dalhousie University. There she is, the largest creature that ever lived. This animal form is something to behold. It's about 70 feet long and once weighed nearly 200,000 pounds. So I ran across a picture the other day of me

at seven years of age standing under the blue whale in the British Museum of Natural History. They have a giant, it's a cast fiberglass blue whale, but this thing's 100 feet long and I have this little boy standing underneath it. And I looked at it and thought, holy cow, here I am, it's 57 years later, I'm 64 years old, I'm finally realizing what I dreamed of as a seven-year-old and wouldn't it be great to be that next seven-year-old who comes in sees this whale and says, someday I'm going to do something for this species or for this environment. Chris Harvey Clark is a veterinarian at Dow. This project took eight years and though the result is a magnificent display that will soon be open to the public,

the process saw the team solving a humongous problem, a problem most Canadians have likely never considered. And that problem is, what do you do with a dead whale that is washed up on shore? We really, really rely on an excavator to do the heavy lifting for us. And we've got whale all over the beach at this point, and we just run into an escalator problem, excavator problem. Just a warning, if you're eating breakfast, we are going to talk about all of this,

including, and be thankful that you can't smell this yourself, the smell of said dead whale. Chris Harvey Clark, is there a Halifax Studio? Chris, good morning. Just delighted to be here, Matt. Holy cow is how you describe what it would be like as a kid to walk into that space. I really look forward to seeing

when the Beattie Biodiversity Center opens, I'm gonna be a fly on the wall and they're watching the people's first reactions as they come in, I think they're gonna be just blown away by it. It's spectacular. Pete Slauson If you walk into that building at Dow now, what do you see up there? Peter Van Doren Well, you're still on a construction site. The main wow effect isn't really going to be realized until the area is open to the public. But it's still, just to see it up

there, it's like a, you know, life stream come true. Peter Van Doren Tell me more about that. And what to you is most remarkable about this whale skeleton? The skeleton is an absolutely beautiful miracle of nature in terms of what it does. And in the cetaceans it's really interesting because the skeletons are full of fat and this in part, blue whales were noted as a sinking species by the way because their bones were just a little denser than water. But when you work with the bones, one of the biggest challenges you have is the amount of fat in the bones. In the time of whaling, 40 tons of fat would come out of the bones of an

average whale skeleton. So in the past, they'd always discarded, the whalers discarded the bones. When they started to whale blue whales, they realized they had an extra goldmine on top of all the other blubber the animal had. But what it does do in the museum setting is it creates a real problem because now you've got five tons of skeleton exuding gallons of oil every day. In fact, famously there was a museum in Paris that had a blue whale that had hung there over 100 years and pretty well every morning there were a couple of liters of smelly black stinky whale oil on the floor. In fact, I've been to that museum and you can still smell the whale in that building.

So getting the fat out of the bones was a real challenge. Pete Slauson These are endangered species. Tell me a little bit more. I mean, the blue whale exists in many ways in our mind. Do you know what I mean? It exists in the sea, but we think of the blue whale. Pete Slauson You know, when I was a little kid and I remember we had these, you know, wide world of science sort of illustrated comics and there was a whole one on the blue whale and it was all about this giant creature and this would be just in the 60s right after we stopped whaling which is 1966.

And seeing that and then seeing the whale at the Natural History Museum, it was such a stupendous sight to see this great big animal. And the terrible thing is, you know, globally a lot of the other whales would come roaring back like minke whales in the North Atlantic, probably a couple hundred thousand. Humpback whales everywhere are doing really well, tens of thousands. There's only a few hundred blue whales in the North Atlantic and they have not come back the way other whales have. We don't really understand fully why that is.

It's a combination, I think, of change in the ocean and they're really very specifically krill eaters. What's happened is the krill densities in the ocean in my lifetime have decreased by 50%. So, you know, there's probably drivers to do with environment and food and also there's human interactions. So, a lot of this is anthropogenic. We did this to this whale and unlike the other ones, you know, there used to be hundreds of thousands of blue whales and in fact, one notorious year, I think it was in the mid-1920s, when mechanized whaling in the Antarctic was going full blast, they took 200,000 blue whales out of the Antarctic. It was a gold rush.

Pete Slauson Tell me about this whale that you found on the beach. How does this begin? Dr. Michael O'Brien Even before this whale, I had befriended a wonderful guy, Dr. Gordon Price, who's an agricultural engineer specializing in composting. I met Gordon because I'd read some of his papers and he was doing these very interesting experiments composting carcasses of animals that carry diseases infectious to man. So I read this stuff and I cold called him.

He didn't know me from Adam. And I said, you know, Gordon, I'm really interested in composting well carcasses. Gordon had cooked up this scheme to use composting techniques. Pardon the pun, cooked up, but to use these composting techniques to basically render well remains and also to get the bones out of them. I told him about how we normally did this in the anatomy lab, which is we flesh things out as well as we can and then we put them in a giant cannibal pot and we boil them until all the soft tissues off and then they're carefully cleaned and degreased and bleached and various other things done to them. He said, well, let's just get a whole whale and just compost the whole thing.

Biggest whale on the planet, blue whale, they're very rare and they're rarely found as carcasses. But in 2017, we had one reported floating up and down the South Shore of Nova Scotia, sort of between Liverpool and down around that area. And it kept appearing in inaccessible beaches that you couldn't get to. You know, a helicopter would be the only way you could get in there. So it wasn't practical to get that whale. Well, eventually she washed up at East Berlin and she wasn't in an accessible area In fact, she was right next to a protected piping plover beach So it made it an interesting exercise to to get to that animal

But we finally had a site where we could get heavy equipment in and recover her What was it like on the beach? I mean the weather you go down there and what I've heard and what I've read is that is lousy weather and you're trying to deal with this enormous thing. The waves are still lapping up on those. So just describe the situation on the beach. It was not a favorable situation. The whale was still fairly intact at this point and you have to realize it was rough as hell. The waves are coming up two meters on the beach. We're having really big tides. On the beach itself is flat plate like rocks about eight or ten inches across. So it's, soon as the whale gets up there and starts breaking up, because they break up just like a ship on shore,

right, the waves are pounding this thing into the stones. The whole place is a greasy skating rink, a whale blubber. There's bits all over the place, and she's more than half in the water. So the first thing was to try and get her up onto the beach, and we basically busted an excavator doing that. We had a 60-ton excavator, tied it off to her tail, tried to pull her up. She was too heavy. You know, these things weigh one to two tons per foot. So you got a 70-foot whale, you probably have well over 100 tons there. This is a 60-ton excavator, busted it. And that was by about 3 o'clock in the afternoon.

So now our main tool is destroyed. We had 35 people there to try and take this animal down to the bone. And nothing much we can do. So come back the next morning, bright and early, new excavator gets unloaded. Guess what? The whale's washed way up the beach. We forgot to tie it down. Now it's 150 meters up the beach. And broken apart, right? So parts of it would float away.

Starting to bust apart and we'd already recognized even when it first came ashore, one of the mandibles, you know, jaw bone 15 feet long was gone, couldn't find it, it's probably out there in the Atlantic somewhere, we never did find it and we never did actually get a cause of death on that animal. There was no clear, you know There was no smoking gun

Unfortunately, you know, you're the expert but from a distance this sounds ghastly on this on the the the beach Carving up this this whale carcass and I can't imagine I hinted at this in the introduction what this thing smelled like Well, the smell was atrocious As vets as vets we're just used to that, right? We live in a really stinky world. Sick animals smell bad and dead animals smell worse. So you mentioned the composting and you have these dump trucks full of whale carcass and then you need to go and get into the composting site.

Our producer, Mary Catherine McIntosh, went with you to this whale composting site. And it was there that the researchers from Dalhousie created a compost recipe for whales that includes horse manure and sawdust. Have a listen to this. This is life at the composting site. And you will also hear from an instructor from Dal, Chris Nelson. Welcome to ground zero composting central.

And so this is the landing place for, for these whales. So we started dealing with some smaller whales in kind of preparation for getting to the blue whale, which, which we eventually did. We had a small Mickey whale that came in. So that was, I guess, you know, the, the, the first introduction we, we learned how to kind of compost something larger than we'd ever seen before and how to manage the bones. Where's the pilot whale?

In the bin as well. So we have a pilot whale here as well that we did. That was last year. What's in this pile? What is this? It looks like just a big pile of horse manure. It does, which is the nice thing with the composting process.

If it's done properly, you'd never have known that there was a whale under there. There's absolutely no smell. It's always smell is sweet air and we're standing three feet away from a rotten pilot whale in there somewhere. It was probably bones by now, I would think. What do we got here? Is that a rib cage? Oh, it's a rib cage, yeah. And it's quite

composted actually. Yeah. So that's really what it smells like. So once you start to expose the tissue, yeah, you will get a bit of an ammonia smell, a little bit of a decomposition smell, but nothing like as bad as other smells I've smelled as a veterinarian. The beach was probably the worst time in terms of the smell and when that first incision is made and stuff comes out you don't want to be downwind from that. Yeah up from the ground comes a bubble and crude as they say. Especially with the whales they distend internally, the gas is in the gut and it's actually a bit dangerous when you open them up, things just come flying out of that little tiny incision. And the pressure is like what you'd have in a car tire,

30, 40 pounds per square inch. And it can knock you down basically. And if it doesn't, the smell will. Okay, Gav, what is the hardest thing about doing a news quiz right now in 2025? Donald Trump. The hardest thing is that we've had to rewrite the script, what, four times today because he changes his mind literally every hour.

Yeah, the tariffs are off, the tariffs are on. But I mean, the good thing is on our quiz show, it doesn't really matter if people give the right answer because it's more fun when they give the wrong answer. This is true and guaranteed if Trump's in the office, there will be a lot of wrong answers. Spotify, follow us every Friday. New app. It's because news.

... ... I mean, part of this process as well was just to try and figure out what people can do when they wash up, you know, on one of your beaches or in your community because it is a monumental problem to deal with. So we wanted to try and come up with some of that know-how of how to manage and what are some of the other options.

There are some interesting videos on YouTube from I think the 1970s where there's one particularly famous video that they tried to deal with a whale with dynamite with the with expected results. It was on the Oregon coast. It was in the 1970s and there were crowds of people there and they blew this whale up with TNT and pieces of blubber the size of your basically the size of your sofa weighing a thousand pounds were landing all around. One landed on a car roof, demolished the car. They used a bit too much powder, you know what I mean? But it's been an accepted method for demolition of whales to break them down and it's been done in Australia, New Zealand. I wouldn't say it's a preferred method, but one of the points that Chris and Gordon- What do you mean break them down?

Basically open the carcass up so that the scavengers can get it so that the processes in the ocean and the beach can start to break it down to bones and then eventually back into the environment. And you put it back in the ocean? Well when you put it back in the ocean intact, now you've got a hazard to navigation, right? You've got a 60, 70 ton object floating around and if you hit that in your boat, it could be bad for you. So once a whale's up on the beach,

it's a big deal. And if it's a popular swimming beach, even more so. And in fact, it turns out, Newfoundland had seven blue whales that were crushed in the ice and washed up in one year. And the towns were just shaking their heads.

What are we going to do? How are we going to deal with 100 tons of dead whale right in the middle of our town. What Gordon and Chris have come up with is a solution. You can do it right there. You can bury those whales right there in compost.

You won't be able to smell it and in a few years you will have beautiful bones. Easy solution. All you need is a few tons of horse poop and sawdust and away you go. There's another bone over there. Yeah, there's another bone. So you can hear with this particular compost, the musk is underfoot. These have been composting for three years, so they're quite well composted. Oh, that's the manis! Okay, that's the manis. Oh wow! Yeah, and there's the humerus there.

It's almost like an archaeological dig going through the pile Sympathies I developed I guess would have been with the the people that would have done this out in the ocean when when they were out wailing and and just How heavy the the blubber and all this tissue is and and to have done that without the benefit of modern hydraulic? Equipment, you know, and vehicles. Muscle and arm and those guys must have all been like Charles Atlas. They would have been extremely athletic to do this job. It's hard, hard labor. And the smell and the smoke and that like, you know, at least at the end of the day, we could go get warm, you know, have a shower.

Whalers were famous when they came ashore. Nobody would go near them because they smelled so bad from the job they did. Even their boats smelled bad. And if you were downwind from a whaler, you could tell miles away, A, there was a chimney of whale smoke coming off it from the tripods where they would boil the whales up and get the oil out. Secondly, was just the awful rancid smell

from the dead whales, from the oil, from the whole process of butchering and trying out as it was called, taking the oil out of the bones. We should go have a look at your bones, not your bones, your bones. Most people don't know, you know, with this unassuming building, what's hiding in here, which is a good thing for us, because I mean, these, these bones are effectively priceless,

particularly with only 340 North Atlantic right whales left. They are literally a priceless artifact carefully curated. This is our special rack for the ribs. So this is a North Atlantic right whale. This was an animal that washed up in PEI. That was an awful summer. We had 13 North Atlantic right whales died that season and seven, I was involved in the necropsies on seven. Just dreadful. This was a known animal. A known animal, yeah. That's her over there, I think, isn't it? One thing I should point out here,

so as we move down, we're starting to see the jawbones, and for the radio people, that's what, the right whale would be two and a half people, I think, in terms of height standing on each other, and the blue whale one is... More than that. Yeah. Three, four?

Yeah. So, you know, these animals are filter feeders and they basically, the way they filter feed is amazing. They, you know, a big blue whale could engulf the volume of a yellow school bus. And then it squirts that out of its mouth in a matter of seconds by contracting its pouch, pushing its tongue up against the roof of the mouth, and it pushes a

bolus of hundreds of pounds of krill up there and then swallows it. And it does that by filtering through these baleen plates, which are like a series of parallel plates that act like a big filter. Unlike a lot of other whales, like humpback whales can eat fish, they can eat krill, a whole bunch of different

things, and they have sort of intermediate length baleen. And then whales like the right have very long baleen because they eat tiny tiny little copepods into the size of a pinhead. These guys are specialists in two species of krill, the ufosid krill and they can only eat that and nothing else so their baleen is made in such a way it's quite short and it's very very dense and the plates are very close together. It looks like a Goodyear tire. Yeah. So basically what how weird an animal you're growing hair in your mouth that's dense like rubber that you use to filter things from. I mean that's about as crazy as it gets. A big part of the story that we're trying to tell here with going through

this process and putting the whale out on display is it's an opportunity to talk about some of the impacts that people have had on these animals. I mean, these great monsters that have been along since the beginning of time, but they're at great risk of disappearing because of us. Here we have a specimen that just tells that story so well. I'm with Dalhousie veterinarian, Chris Harvey Clark. He's part of a team that just managed to get a blue whale skeleton hung at the university and was part of that whale composting project.

Chris, I mean, you listen to that and it's a lot of work. It's pretty nasty work. It's hard work, but you've said that bones are beautiful objects in many ways. Tell me a little bit more about why you, given everything that you're up against, why you're so set on doing this work. I think it's my commitment to endangered species. You know, as a veterinarian, I've worked with all kinds of endangered species through my whole career.

I've been really lucky. You know, the blue whale is the largest and, you know, other than the North Atlantic, right, probably the most threatened whale we have in our sphere in Canada. So for me, this is kind of coming to the end of my and, you know, other than the North Atlantic, right, probably the most threatened whale we have in our sphere in Canada. So for me, this is kind of coming to the end of my career as a vet who works with many species but very lucky to work with endangered species.

And to bring this animal forward in this way will tell a story for the people who visit the facility of endangered species and what we possibly can do to help them in the future. You know, I couldn't let you go without having you tell the story of another species that you encountered. And this was not washed up on the shore. This was not some rotting carcass. This was you underwater, face to face with a great white shark. Oh boy. Yeah, I'll never forget that day.

I wouldn't think so, no. 2021, November, I think it was November 10th, 2021. I was – I've been diving with a really crazy species, these giant electric rays that are two meters long. They used to be really rare when I started diving in Nova Scotia in the 90s. When I came back in 2014, we were encountering more and more of them. I thought, well, let's start studying these guys. We've tagged over 100 now.

So one of the things we noticed was starting about 2018, we were getting hits on our receivers that we deployed in our secret location of white sharks. Other people had tagged white sharks, notably Dr. Greg Skomel down at the Cape. And they were coming by. They were coming by our site on the way to a nearby seal colony. So we knew they were out there. But it's one thing to know they're out there, it's another to run into one. So I was out one day in rough weather diving with my friend Michael Schwingenheimer, who's

a Navy diver. And we ended up diving on the wreck of the La Tisha, which is an old hospital ship in the harbor. And it sits on a sandy bottom at about 110 feet. And we do see rays there. So we thought, well, we'll pop in there. And it was a rough day. Coming back to where the boat was anchored in about 80 feet and we do see rays there. So we thought, well, we'll pop in there. And it was a rough day coming back to where the boat was anchored in about 80 feet of water.

And I look up and this giant fin goes by, you know, three and a half feet, feet across just at the limit of visibility. And I teach a shark course here. So I'm pretty good on identification. And I've also seen a lot of white sharks, mostly through the bars of a cage or from the surface.

And I instantly knew we had a white shark. So, turned around, faced up slope, watched and this thing came around again much closer. It was a big female, she was about 11 feet long and she cruised by and my buddy still hadn't seen her. So, I started banging on my tank, shark goes by, took a long time to go by, maybe 20 or 30 seconds. She was really giving me the eyeball. And it was terrifying actually, because I was completely mentally unprepared for it. Goes by, by now I've got Michael's attention, he looks up, she comes by a third time. And each time she's inshore from us, she's cut off our access to the shoreline. A very good strategy for keeping a seal in your

sights is to get between it and the shoreline if you're a shark. So we're getting pretty strong signals that this is a really interested white shark. So we went headed straight for the line, stayed on the bottom, heads on a swivel, didn't see it again, got on the line and then realized that between leaving the bottom and going to the surface was going to be our main risk point. So we just rocketed to the surface. We did not do decompression stop, which, you know, that was a calculated risk because deco sickness, you might survive, but out there in the middle

of nowhere, probably an hour for medical attention. Having your leg chomped by a shark. Getting a shark, serious shark bite from a big shark would probably be lethal. Even if it didn't kill you the first go, you probably bleed out. So it was a calculated risk. So we get up to the surface. The top 30 feet of the water had about eight feet of visibility. So I could barely see my fins.

It was murky. It was choppy. It was scary, scary, scary moment. Get Michael on the ladder. And he's got double tanks on. So it just takes him forever to get out of the water. I'm just willing him. Get in the boat faster, damn it.

Finally he gets in the boat. I get on the ladder. I'm just the whole time I'm waiting for that searing, crunching feeling of having some body part taken. Get in the back of the boat. And I just, you know, I'm pinching myself. I can't believe, you know, we just saw a white shark. And as far as we know, this is the first diver encounter in open water with a white shark in Canada. And the fact that it happened to me when I've been doing, you know, shark research on Greenland sharks and six gills and other species for 20 years is just, it's crazy. But you know, I've got 3,400 dives. So at some point, I guess law of averages would say, yeah, if there are white sharks around, I probably will run into one. Well, interesting thing since then, Matt, we've had six other diver encounters within 20 kilometres of

Halifax. In fact, there's one lady who's had two encounters. So what are the chances of that? I told her, listen, I'm going to give you 50 bucks and take you to the casino and I want half your winnings because you realize Lloyds of London would give you no odds on this. So yeah, so they're here. Whites are definitely here. I've done some PSAs and things on sort of shark safety and, you know, what to look out for, but the fact is we've had a lot of weird things happen. You know, a guy's out duck hunting and his dog gets taken before him by a shark a couple of years ago. We had a lady bitten in August of 2021 over in Cape Breton. Numerous, numerous drone and fishermen and other encounters. There's a physician down

at Green Bay, which is just south of the Bloomberg area, and he flew his drone every day in the summer over Green Bay and every single day he saw one to four white sharks in that bay. So they're definitely around. Pete The sense of wonder that you have about the ocean and what lives in the ocean is remarkable and it's infectious. It's a great pleasure to talk to you about the work that you have about the ocean and what lives in the ocean is remarkable and it's infectious. It's a great pleasure to talk to you about the work that you're doing. And I can't wait to get out to Dow when the skeleton is available for public view hanging

from the ceiling. You know, it's one of the great joys of my life is to be able to share my fascination with and love for the sea and my stewardship also of endangered species, which has been a, you know, it's been a theme in my life. Congratulations on all your work. Chris, thank you very much.

Thank you, Matt. Chris Harvey Clark is a veterinarian at Dalhousie University here in Halifax and that incredible blue whale skeleton will be on display when the Beaty Center for Marine Biodiversity opens at Dal later this year.