War of the Whales by Joshua Horwitz Read Free Book Online Page A

back in, so it would be an hour or more before there would be enough water in the lagoon to float the body to shore. Balcomb hated the idea of leaving it exposed to the elements for even a minute longer. The whale was a juvenile, only about 11 feet long. But it still weighed more than 1,500 pounds, and they couldn’t budge it off the sandy bottom of the lagoon. After some rocking and rolling, they managed to get a tarp underneath the whale’s belly, tie a rope around its tail fluke, and tow it out of the lagoon and up onto the beach.

    Blainville’s beaked whale that stranded in the lagoon behind Cross Harbor, March 16, 2000. Subsequent necropy and CT scans revealed a subarachnoid hemorrhage and blood in the cochlear aqueduct.
     

    Dave Ellifrit with the Blainville’s beaked whale that stranded at Cross Harbor, March 16, 2000.

    •  •  •
    It’s shockingly easy to cut off the head of a Blainville’s whale. All you need is the right kind of knife, a strong stomach, and a detailed knowledge of beaked whale anatomy. Balcomb had all three.
    He’ d procured the knife, a 16-inch blade with a weathered oak handle, during a research trip to Norway a decade earlier. Scandinavians had been using long-handled flensing knives to carve the blubber off of whales for 1,000 years, but this was a specialty blade designed to cut up large fish and seals. Balcomb called it his “O.J.,” as in Simpson—much to Claridge’s chagrin—and he always kept it honed to a razor’s edge, just in case something interesting washed up on the beach.
    Knowing how to decapitate a beaked whale was a hard-won bit of arcana, something he’ d picked up during four decades of roaming the globe in search of
Cetacea: Ziphiidae
. He’ d studied every textbook on whale anatomy, picked through the cutting room floors of whaling stations from California to Japan to Iceland in search of skeletons. While on Midway Island in his late-twenties, he dissected his first beaked whale, a Cuvier’s that had washed ashore dead on a coral shelf in the very middle of the Pacific Ocean. While living in Japan he’ d frequented a family-run whaling station that still hunted the largest beaked whales in the world—the 40-foot Baird’s beaked whales—in the waters outside Tokyo Bay. After the workers were done with their butchering, Balcomb was free to study and sketch the skeleton and internal anatomy. Though the Baird’s whales are twice the size of Cuvier’s, all beaked whales are deep divers that share the same basic anatomy and physiology.
    Cutting off a beaked whale’s head can take an hour if you don’t know your way around its distinctive anatomy. Balcomb figured he could get it done in just under ten minutes. The tricky part is figuring out where the whale’s head ends and its trunk begins. All mammals, from giraffes to moles, have seven vertebrae in their necks. But over the course of its evolution, the beaked whale’s cervical vertebrae have fused into a bony mass, creating the appearance of a no-necked creature. Balcomb knew the precise spot to cut in—a foot behind the blowhole, halfway between the eye and the flipper—and how to feel his way with the blade through the blubber and muscle all the way down to the bone. A 16th inch too far back, and the knife can’t sever the cervicals. A 16th inch too far forward, and the blade bangs up against the cranial vault.
    The crevice between the skull and the first cervical vertebra is curved, so he had to work the blade at an angle until he found the precise seam, and then pivot it back and forth like a clam knife until the spinal cord gave way. It was quick work to slice through the cranial nerves and the network of arteries that feed oxygenated blood to the brain. As the blood poured out of the whale’s neck, Balcomb was grateful that at low tide the lagoon was too shallow to attract sharks.

    Balcomb cutting off the head of a Blainville’s beaked whale at Cross Harbor to preserve an