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

evidence trail of the mass stranding.

    Balcomb worked deep inside the carcass, more by touch than by sight. He pushed the blade through the soft tissue of the esophagus, and then past the cartilage and other connective tissue of the larynx and the windpipe. There was only a half foot of muscle and blubber below the throat. Deftly avoiding the hyoid bone collar at the base of the throat, Balcomb completed his cut, and the head hinged away from the carcass like a stout felled tree.
    “Bravo,” Claridge said softly as she lowered the video camera from her shoulder and stooped to admire the specimen. Balcomb was pleased by what a clean cut he’ d made, and by how well articulated and intact the vascular structures had remained. For a bone hunter like Balcomb, a beaked whale skull is the rarest of trophies. If it hadn’t been a vital piece of forensic evidence, he’ d have buried the head deep in the sand and let the underground beetles and sand flies pick the cranium clean over the next few weeks. Then he’ d place the treasure on the high shelf at the beach house, alongside the other two
Ziphius cavirostris
(beaked whale) skulls he’ d collected in four decades of beachcombing.
    A beaked whale’s head tells the entire tale of its remarkable evolution. Its cranium is almost twice as thick as a dolphin’s, the better to withstand extreme water pressure at depth. Its dense, beaked rostrum is both a powerful weapon against mate-competing males and a potent defense against sharks. The beaked whale’s sound-emitting powers originate in its nasal cavities, which transmit both communication sounds and sonar clicks. Its concave forehead cradles an acoustic lens, or melon, that focuses sound into different beam forms. Its long jawbone conducts return echoes and incoming communications from other whales to the three small ear bones common to all mammals, which are nested well back in its head. Elaborately convoluted, with an enormous auditory cortex, the beaked whale’s brain is a masterpiece of signal processing. It can conduct multiple conversations simultaneously, as well as translate biosonar echoes into exquisitely detailed, three-dimensional maps.
    As far as Balcomb was concerned, the beaked whales of Great Bahama Canyon were the niftiest piece of biotechnology ever engineered. Ever since he was a kid, he had taken things apart so he could study their design, then put them back together. He was a connoisseur of well-made machines: cars, boats, planes. To hear his wives tell it, Balcomb was an incurable tightwad who never wanted to spend a dime on clothes or restaurants or home improvement. But back at Smugglers Cove, he kept a half dozen mint-condition classic and vintage cars parked in makeshift garages on the grounds around his house.
    Spattered with sweat and sand and bits of flesh, Balcomb knelt in the sand and stared at the decapitated Blainville’s. All that magnificent engineering, he thought, couldn’t save this whale from whatever the hell had happened in the canyon.
    While two Earthlings videotaped and took photographs, Balcomb, Claridge, and Ellifrit went to work collecting tissue specimens. They took samples of the blubber, lungs, heart, kidney, and intestines. A beaked whale’s liver, the size of a large shoulder bag, is usually the first organ to rot. But Balcomb was reassured to find that this one was still firm and fresh. They washed each specimen with acetone, wrapping several slices in aluminum foil and fixing others in formalin.
    Though he was normally laconic, Balcomb gave the Earthlings a running anatomy tutorial on the Blainville’s beaked whale he was dissecting. He explained that a Blainville’s is smaller than a Cuvier’s, and that it’s also called a dense-beaked whale, because its beaked rostrum is the densest bone found in any animal. He showed them the specialized lipids in the blubber and the vascular plumbing in the fin, flukes, and flippers that keep a whale from overheating