sea lions that eat small fish that feed on
the toxic algae. The toxin can make its
way into the sea lion’s bloodstream
and its brain, causing seizures, heart
disease and even death.
How these same toxins affect a
creature as large as a whale remains
unknown. One theory is that infected
whales are at greater risk of ship
strikes—the toxins may target the brain
and cause disorientation.
They take a baleen sample to screen
for feeding and hormone levels related
to stress and reproduction. Cottrell pries
off samples of a humpback-specific bar-
nacle—a walnut-sized crustacean that
spends its adult life embedded in the
skin of whales, using its feathery leg-like
cirri to grab a fast-food diet of tiny plank-
ton as its host swims through the ocean.
“They’re taking a ride to the buffet,”
Larry Taylor, a doctoral student at the
University of California, Berkeley, tells
me later. “These whales are travelling
to rich, productive waters to feed, and
the barnacles get to enjoy the feast.”
Barnacles cause no apparent harm to
the whales but can yield important
information. Shell growth layers con-
tain chemical signatures related to tem-
perature and chemistry of the ocean
waters visited by the whales, hinting at
their migration routes.the necropsy concludes after two
hours, hurried by an incoming tide
gnawing away at the sands.
Everyone heads back to the Hakai
Institute’s facilities, knowing it will be
months before all the samples have
been analyzed and more light has been
shed on the cause of the whale’s demise.
Raverty takes one last look at the
hacked-up carcass and offers an edu-
cated guess as to the cause of death: “I
wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a fracture.”
Two days later, a four-person team
led by Michael deRoos from Cetacea,
a British Columbia company that spe-
cializes in creating skeleton exhibits,
arrives to take up where the necropsy
team left off. While separating the
whale’s bones from the rest of its flesh,
deRoos discovers extensive bruising of
the flesh on one side of the skull and
loose pieces of bones suggesting a pos-
sible fracture on the other. One plausi-
ble scenario is a ship strike near Hakai
Pass, about five kilometres from where
the whale washed up.
What we do know is that the food
web benefitted. “There were quite a
few wolf tracks around the whale,”
deRoos says. “It’s a pretty big windfall
for any scavengers out there. I imagined
the wolves curled up with full bellies,ONE RIB PROTUDES
LIKE A PIECE OF
DRIFTWOOD, LUNGS
RESEMBLE A BIG SLAB
OF CORNED BEEF.rd.ca 75