somewhere in the bushes, watching
us gut the thing up.”
The bones are put into slings and
flown to the Hakai Institute’s property
and then sunk into the seawater to let
nature continue the defleshing pro-
cess. In two or three months, deRoos
explains, the bones will be taken to
Cetacea for further treatment. Crews
will reassemble the skeleton in seg-
ments before barging it in crates back
to Calvert Island next summer to be
put together and suspended as a full
skeleton from the ceiling in the Hakai
Institute’s communal dining room.
DeRoos’s previous work—the skel-
eton of an old male sea otter that
washed ashore on Calvert Island in
2016—already hangs in the lodge,
meticulously reconstructed so that it
appears to be diving for a sea urchin.
Eric Peterson, who co-founded the
Hakai Institute with Christina Munck,
his wife, expects deRoos to give the
whale skeleton a similar treatment.
“It’s a celebration of one of nature’s
great creatures and a celebration of
the skill and ingenuity of an artist
doing incredible work in an interesting
medium,” Peterson explains.
In the meantime, labs across North
America will continue to extract infor-
mation from samples collected byRaverty and his team. A U.S. National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administra-
tion office located in Seattle, Wash.,
gets material, with additional samples
headed to other state and university
veterinary labs with expertise in marine
mammal health. The barnacles end up
at the California Academy of Sciences,
as part of graduate students’ research
projects, while the National Institutes of
Health in Maryland looks for unusual
disease agents such as the cat parasite
Toxoplasma gondii, flushed into the
oceans through toilets.
Some tissue and blood samples
will also be frozen and available to
scientists launching new studies years
or even decades from now. Clearly,
this young whale’s story did not end
when it died.
Its flesh fed a full range of terrestrial
and marine scavengers. Its fate becomes
part of the known record of whale
deaths along North America’s west
coast, helping to inform ocean manag-
ers and enhance a greater database of
long-term trends, be they related to
disease, human actions or ocean con-
ditions. And its skeleton is likely to
educate and enthrall visitors to Calvert
Island for decades to come.Think Big
The brain is wider than the sky.
EMILY DICKINSON©BY LARRY PYN 2019, LARRY PYNN, FRON. FROM HAKAI MM “A HAGUMAZINPBACK WE (SEPTEMHODBER 24, UNIT,”
2019), HAKAIMAGAZINE.COMreader’s digest
76 april 2020