Bones of a behemoth: Volunteers remove skeleton from dead whale

Armed with shoulder-length gloves and knee-high boots, volunteers played a high-stakes game of “Operation,” only this patient was a 40-foot gray whale, and there was a lot more on the line than a loud buzzing noise.

More than 70 physicians, researchers, marine biologists and university students gathered Friday to cut out and preserve the bones of the deceased whale on the Central Whidbey beach. The YMCA organization, which owns nearby Camp Casey, got special permission to debone the whale so that it may become an educational display someday.

The whale was a mass of bones with blubber hanging off in blobs by Friday morning. It was slimy and covered in rocks and sand. A volunteer described the carcass as “soupy,” as remnants oozed out of it onto the sand. Yet the overpowering odor of the prodigious cadaver had diminished from weeks earlier.

The whale originally appeared at Ebey’s Landing in Coupeville on July 14 and the waves pushed her to the beach in front of YMCA Camp Casey, where she arrived on July 25.

YMCA Executive Director Jake Carlson said the organization decided to turn the tragic death of the whale into an opportunity.

“We took about six hours of kicking rocks and said, ‘What do we do with a dead whale carcass?’ And then quickly, we were like, ‘Well, we’re at camp, let’s make this educational. Let’s take an opportunity to take something that is a natural occurrence, could be seen as a tragedy, and turn it into a positive, to be able to educate kids, youth, adults and a community on whales and on what it means to live in the Pacific Northwest,’” he said.

After consulting with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Island County Natural Resources, the Central Puget Sound Marine Mammal Stranding Network and others, Carlson decided to take on the project of removing the bones and turning them into a display at YMCA Camp Casey.

During a routine check to ensure none of the bones washed away from the YMCA property, Carlson pulled a maxilla bone out of the carcass on Aug. 3. He claimed it was as easy as wiggling out a loose tooth. Two days later, Carlson sent out a bulk email, enlisting volunteers to help preserve the bones. He wrote, “We need help cutting, hauling bones and gorp, documenting and cataloging. This will take a small army!”

The project of cutting out the bones was supposed to take two days, but it was completed on the first day since more than 70 volunteers helped.

“It reminds me of coastal tribes,” said Kelly Zupich, the Shore Friendly Program coordinator for Island County. “They come together, they take it apart together, they cook it together and so it’s a similar thing, even though we’re not doing the same exact thing.”

In an email leading up to the event, Carlson told the volunteers to wear proper equipment to protect from marine mammal diseases. They were instructed to bring bib overalls, rain gear, rubber knee boots, rubber gloves and clothes that they didn’t mind tossing or burning afterwards, in case the smell sticks.

Upon arrival at the beach, the volunteers were each given a responsibility, based on their backgrounds, to ensure the whole process of extracting the bones from the carcass and cataloging them was as seamless as possible.

Cutters removed the bones from the animal with blades that dulled in a matter of slashes due to the sand and rocks embedded in the flesh, hence the need for a trio of knife sharpeners – Steve Layman, Rob Harris and Emily Houser – huddled nearby.

Layman, now a longtime Whidbey resident, recalled receiving a call from Volunteer Coordinator Matthew Klope about helping out with the whale, given his biology background and experience cutting meat at his parents’ grocery store growing up in Yakima.

Knives blunted fast, so the trio sought usability rather than perfection in their work, sharpening them just long enough to “get an edge on them,” Layman said. Part of the challenge in doing so, according to Harris, a Sound Water Stewards volunteer, was handling the knives with oily gloves, glossy with the whale’s pale fat.

What did work in their favor was the carcass’ considerably weakened stench. Houser, a taxidermist perennially fascinated with death, said bacteria causes decomposition to smell, which decreases as flesh rots as bacteria has less to feed on.

Once the meat was separated, catalogers measured the distance between the bones so when they put them back together, it will look like the original whale. Draggers were in charge of dragging bones to the water for a rinse, bringing them to the flensers to cut off the excess blubber and then pulling the bones down the beach to their collection.

Finally, haulers carried and dumped buckets of the “gorp” and “snarge,” or the whale waste, along the cliffs, above the high tide line. This way, the waste could decompose naturally and its nutrients would be distributed back into the sand. It will also give scavengers an opportunity to feast on them, Carlson noted.

“Big vision is that this is educational every step of the way,” he said.

For volunteers like Hayden Hutcherson, a wildlife biologist from Arizona who was with the Cascadia Research Collective, and some of the students from Au Sable Institute like Lamar Kendrick from Ohio and Elijah Eggers from Illinois, this was an opportunity to work with a marine mammal in a way they have never had before.

Eggers found the whale’s death and the subsequent dissection simultaneously sentimental and interesting as he dug into muscle near the whale’s tail, a texture he likened to “raw chicken.”

“It’s sad but it’s also a good learning experience,” he said.

Volunteers learn throughout the process, no matter if it’s their first or tenth whale, Carlson explained: from learning about decomposition, to removing and identifying bones, to articulating a whale, to learning about the whale once the full skeleton is on display.

Carlson affirmed that this is a legacy project for the approximate 600 campers this summer who can bring back their kids or grandkids decades from now and say, “I was there the first summer,” he enthused.

Klope, a retired biologist for the Navy who is a volunteer himself, said he was impressed with the turnout Friday. He praised the team of volunteers, claiming without them, the bone removal would take a week.

On Friday, Klope directed and helped people remove the skull and ribs, working their way down the vertebrae towards the tail until every bone was collected.

Yet, “this is just the beginning,” Klope said.

Over the next two years, or so, volunteers will prepare the bones for the display.

First, they will bury the bones in horse manure, a natural remedy to clean the bones. This was the group’s preffered alternative to putting them in the water to decompose.

Six to eight months later, volunteers will pull the bones back out of the manure. Then, because the bones will be stained from the manure, they will bleach them back to white and seal them. Finally a team will articulate the skeleton, Klope detailed.

Jessie Huggins, a biologist and the stranding coordinator for the Cascadia Research Collective, explained that due to the whale’s state of decomposition upon arrival at Ebey’s Landing, her team opted not to perform a necropsy. Though, they did take a blubber sample for contaminants and a skin sample for genetics. However, scientists are unable to determine the whale’s cause of death.

Gray whales have recently had an unusual uptick in mortality events, Huggins said. While on average, the mortality number for the gray whale population in Washington is usually six to 10 deaths a year, this year there have been 15, causing reasons for concern as the population is still much smaller than before 2019, when it experienced a catastrophic mortality event, killing 40% of its population, according to Huggins.

A number of the whales that died along the coasts of Washington have shown signs of malnutrition, she said. Often when marine animals show these signs, they’re in areas they’re not normally, because they’re searching for food so they’re more susceptible to being in a ship strike or an entanglement, she explained.

“The consistent theme since 2019 has been malnutrition in quite a number of the whales, including whales that have stranded elsewhere, like Mexico, all the way up to Alaska. And so it appears to be issues with their primary feeding areas in the Arctic and the food web there, ‘cause they fast all winter,” Huggins said.

When the whales don’t get enough food in the summer, then when they make their southbound migration, they can’t go any further once they get to Washington, she explained.

For the crew that worked to remove the bones from the dead whale in front of the YMCA at Camp Casey, the project was both sobering and rewarding. Though it was his first time leading such an effort, Carlson said he is grateful for the positive outcome.

“You can’t help but have a sense of emotion about the whole situation. What’s nice to know is that what has ended in death for this creature will provide life-giving opportunities for education,” Carlson said. “And so it really is a circle of life moment.”

If you find a stranded animal on the beach, Huggins advised calling the West Coast Stranding Network and keeping children and pets away from live or dead animals.

Allyson Ballard contributed to this story.

(Photo by David Welton) Teamwork made the whale dissection a day’s work. The whale skeleton looked almost dinosaur-like once most of the meat had been removed.