the whale that exploded

I watch some random crap on TV, and it seems that now we have digital cable and all our stollen channels back, this trend is only likely to get worse. Like last night, when D and I chose to spend most of the hour before bed watching s show trying to figure out why this giant sperm whale went kablooey.

It was actually pretty interesting.

See, there was a sperm whale that washed up in an oyster farm in Taiwan, and since it was dead, they had to figure out what to do with it, and they had to figure out why it was dead. If ti had washed up on a beach, they'd just necorpsy it there, take it apart, and send the parts to various marine biology places and universities and such, and the bones'd wind up in a museum somewhere-- especially since this is a sperm whale, which doesn't get seen or studied much.

But this one washed up in moderately deep water, so they had to fish it out (much like the way I had to fish out my goldfish that very morning, only much, much much bigger). They thought it was an average-size whale, maybe 20 ot 25 tons. But when the 45-ton crane couldn't lift it, they realized it was bigger than they thought, and they had to get a bigger crane, a 120-tonner, and that one just managed to hoist it, on two absurdly-skinny wires, onto a waiting truck that it crushed. It had to be lifted again and placed on a longer, heavier truck, and it was still too big. The picture I chose for this post shows both the grossness at the end of this saga, and the sheer size of this thing: the biggest truck they had, and the tail was still dragging on the road as they drove it around. I mean, there's a whole section about how internal decomp-pressure pushes the genitals out, and that whale's penis is taller than I am. Talk about intimidating. And they keep saying how big it is.

So they've got this massive dead creature on a truck, and they have to wait overnight to get through the Coast Guard check point because it took all day to get it out of the water, and it's too late to navigate the town now. And the blowhole blows in the middle of the night, with the grossness, but only a fraction of what's to come. In the morning, they take it to the labs they're headed to, and it's too big for the lab, so they have to redirect this massive bundle to the university, and half way back through the town, it blows. Guts and blood and gross, all over the downtown area. They want to know why, so there's this show.

When they get it cleaned up and finally to the university, they take it apart and find that it's spine bones are broken, and it's insides are severely damaged, and the story becomes an ecological disaster story: the whale was hit by a cargo ship, and killed, hopefully instantly. Apparently, the engines of the ships are way in the back, and the bulk and solidity of the ship itself blocks the sound from reaching creatures up front, and even if a little does, so many ships churn through the water that there's a sort of white noise in the ocean from it, and the whale probably never had a chance. Sadness. And scary. Because some scientist recently found a whole pod of sperm whales floating upright in the water after a long dive, looking like rocky promontories rather than whales, and visible only from the air, and that means that if all of them do this, they could be getting hit all over the place.* And unless it washes up, or the ship reports it, no one would know.

But man, what a gross show.

*There's whole ecosystems on the bottom of the sea that can live for years off a single whalefall; I wonder if there are more of them now? A ship-killed whale that isn't near the coast would just folat around, get torn up by sharks, and then fall, and if there are more of them then there were, there should be more of these ecosystems, right?