Whales are textbook beauty and grace—and they’re a helluva lot of work to clean up when they die.
Whales are textbook beauty and grace—and they’re a helluva lot of work to clean up when they die. Today, we’re diving into one of the most bizarre, smelly, and heartbreaking jobs in the world: working on a marine animal stranding response team.
Thanks to Dr. Susan Barco and Dr. Alex Costidis at The Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center Stranding Response Program, here are a few curiosities you’ll uncover in this episode:
Did You Know?
For every foot in length, a whale weighs about two thousand pounds.
To learn more about the stranding response team and how you can support them (as well as how to take a whale watching tour), please visit these links:
https://www.virginiaaquarium.com/research-and-conservation/stranding-response
https://www.virginiaaquarium.com/support/give-to-stranding
https://www.virginiaaquarium.com/things-to-do/boat-tours
https://www.virginiaaquarium.com/blog/whale-watching-boat-tours
Credits
Curious State is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast hosted and produced by Doug Fraser.
Find Curious State on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, or subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates.
Podcast Manager - Adam Cecil
Podcast and Advertising Operations Specialist - Morgan Christianson
Digital Operations Specialist - Holly Hutchings
Marketing and Publicity Assistant - Davina Tomlin
Intern - Brendan Picha
The Quick and Dirty Tips network is a division of Macmillan Publishers in partnership with Mignon Fogarty, Inc.
A special thanks to Brennan Tapp for assisting in this episode's field recordings, and Mackenzie DiNardo (PR Manager at the VA Aquarium) for helping make all this happen.
Have a question? Or a topic you’d like covered on the show? Maybe you just love sending emails? Whichever shoe fits, tie it on and send me a message at curious@quickanddirtytips.com.
Doug
It's magnificent, isn't it? The way a whale's fins glide through the water, the mountainous arch, it reveals on the surface when it comes up for air. Sometimes they feel playful and breach, sending their massive bodies flying through the air. It's the money shot you see printed on souvenir postcards and play out in slow motion and wildlife documentaries. From the moment it slides from its mother and into the world. A whale is textbook elegance and grace. And all of that blubbery beauty eventually comes to an end.
When you send us the message about you know, so the the main theme is going to be how do you get rid of a dead whale? My first answer was very thoughtfully and not in one piece.
Doug
Today, we're diving into one of the most bizarre, smelly and heartbreaking jobs in the world. I'm Doug Fraser, and this is Curious State.
We have Stafford, Virginia aquarium on board with us. We'll be providing you with interesting information about the wildlife that we're hoping to see. And we'll be more than happy to answer any questions that you might have.
Doug
Whale tours are notorious for being a gamble. actually seen one of these see giants isn't very likely. But both coordinator Mike Mizel assures me we have a pretty good shot,
there's been very few trips we haven't seen in a while the likelihood is very good. Very good.
Doug
These chunky cetaceans eat about a ton and a half of anchovies, other small fish and krill every day. And for reference, that's the weight of 12,000 Quarter Pounder cheeseburgers, it's all to fuel the complex machine that makes up their inner workings, like be 18 foot tail known as the fluke, or the complex vocal cords that allow the male humpback to produce songs up to 30 minutes long. And let's not forget the heart.
Sue
You know, the heart can be the size of a small car, you know, so just to see an aorta that you could keep slide a kid through, you know, it's really fascinating,
Doug
that's Sue Barco. She's a senior scientist at the Virginia aquarium, and helps lead the Virginia Aquarium Stranding Response Team.
Sue
I've been with the aquarium forever, and kind of watched this training program evolved from a couple of volunteers chasing after seals on the beach to a, a world class program that has really contributed quite a bit to science.
Alex
Hello, my name is Alex. I'm one of the senior scientists for the stranding response and research program at the Virginia Aquarium and along with Sue, we kind of help steer the ship here. First goal is to determine cause of death. And then secondary and on goals are to facilitate science collect additional samples for other researchers, things like that.
Doug
This episode was recorded during the mask mandate. So pardon the muffled sound of safety. Sue and Alex couldn't come along for the whale watching tour. Their schedules were packed so we're chatting at the straining response headquarters.
Sue
Anytime you see a whale that is washed ashore, it's there's it's either dead or there's something probably critically wrong with it.
Doug
What's the main causes of death?
Sue
Vessel strikes and entanglements.
Doug
For us landlubbers, entanglements are when an animal gets caught up in fishing gear or marine debris. You guys are called stranding response. How do you define what's stranded.
Sue
In general, we say a stranded marine animal is a marine animal that is sick or injured, or otherwise cannot return to its normal habitat. So it can be swimming around with gear on it, it could be entrapped in a, in a so shallow water area, we've had a turtle trapped in a temporary swimming enclosure that got in there to very high tide before it could be out of habitat. So here at the wrong time, a manatee here in late winter. Way up a river we had an animal and a manatee that was in a cooling canal of a nuclear power plant. Things like that. We also consider strandings. But most of the time, it's when an animal that isn't supposed to be on the beach is on the beach, whether it's alive or dead.
Doug
For the whales that are on the beach but still alive--Can't you just you know, push them back in the water.
Alex
My sort of dramatic analogy of that is to have someone walk into an ER and to push them back out and close the door.
Sue
And one of the biggest problems we have with stranding response in live trainings is people pushing an animal back into the water after it has stranded because they are convinced that that's the best thing to do what you're doing when you push an animal back and you're taking a very sick air breathing animal and putting it back in the marine environment in an area where it may be unable to reach the surface to breathe normally where it may attract predators and scavengers, and where it may once again get tossed around very severely in heavy surf, which it has already had to deal with once and someone pushed it pack, we've probably had what, maybe a half a dozen live whales in the past 20 years. And then that same time we've had it probably over 100 Whale strandings the stranded live whale is not the norm. Most of them die, and then wash ashore dead.
Doug
When a whale Stranding is reported, the straining team notifies their federal colleagues and regulating agencies, then it's time to start figuring out resources.
Alex
It's a delicately orchestrated dance that involves moments of panic and moments of science and organization.
Doug
And an abnormally large excavator.
Sue
You know, I call up a company that I'm not familiar with, and I'm like, Okay, I need your most experienced, safest excavator operator, I need your biggest excavator. And this is what we're gonna do. And they're like, really, you know, and they kind of tend to want to give us somebody that, that doesn't have a lot of experience. And I'm like, No, you don't understand everybody walking around, this machine is going to have no clue what's going on. And they're going to get focused on working on this whale or looking at things and they're not going to understand that there's a very large piece of equipment that can kill them, you know, right next to them. It's been a it's actually been a really fun thing to do.
Doug
She has gotten really good at it, too. She knows exactly what the team will and won't need. So when a new coordinator thinks a front loader will do the job,
Sue
like oh, no, you don't know you don't and you don't want wheels. You want tracks if you're on sand, and you need an articulating thumb on the bucket for the excavator and you know,
Alex
Most common challenges for people to not really understand how heavy these animals are. Even the operators, so it's quite common for inexperienced coordinators, unlike Sue, to just accept some piece of equipment because the expert about the equipment is the operator that says, oh, no, I'll bring this it'll be more than enough. And it oftentimes is not.
Sue
My first right whale that I coordinated. We had five pieces of equipment on it trying to pull it up a beach at Oregon inlet and we had to cut the head off to move it because it was too big.
Doug
What do you use to take a head off of a whale,
Sue
A knife.
Alex
To cut through whale blubber, you need tension, the blubber needs to be under tension. Otherwise, it's like trying to take your kitchen knife and cut through a tractor tire. You use the equipment to bend the neck and create tension so that when your blade hits it, it spreads rather than collapsing on your knife. And, yeah, it's a it's a really odd skill set.
Doug
So the stranding response team calls and gets their excavator. Now it's time to assemble the crew. But how many people does it take to get samples from and then get rid of a dead whale?
Alex
We've done skeleton skeleton crew type of investigations like that with two or three people. And then we've done ones with 40 people
Sue
that lasted several days, and we've had a couple of multi day events as well.
Alex
Although nothing good ever comes from extending it beyond one day.
Sue
But sometimes you have to.
Alex
It becomes progressively more unpleasant and less productive.
Doug
Unexpected challenges are part of the job and a big determining factor in how long the process of getting rid of a dead whale will take. And as you can imagine, Sue and Alex have some very interesting stories. One hot and wild Fourth of July weekend and Delaware could have turned into a marathon session. Luckily, Sue, Alex, and their team were on the job.
Sue
It had cooled down to the upper 90s for those couple of days. We were there. But yeah, we were told
Alex
we're given a day to have this really large whale.
Sue
Get rid of this 50 ton animal and make the beach look pristine in six hours.
Doug
What the hell do you do?
Sue
I made him get up really early.
Alex
We worked through it and we even collected the whole skeleton for a Museum.
Sue
and the whale was literally melting in front of us. It was the we had three new craps accumulators and I'm sitting there watching the heavy equipment has like holding up the head and there's literally oil streaming off of it onto the hat of one of our team leaders. It wasn't Alex but I'm like he's gonna be like totally waterproof when this is over with. It was crazy. But yeah, we did it. Our primary dissection instrument when we can when we can get it is a track excavator. It's not a scalpel.
Alex
We call it construction surgery so you're supposed to do this detailed dissection to collect samples from a 40 ton whale. Samples that need to fit into a penny sized or quarter sized cassette. And you need to do that with a 60 ton excavator.
Sue
You might have to move 10 tons of tissue before you can get to that penny sized piece of, of tissue that's going to be the lesion that's going to confirm your suspicion of cause of death. And then the public shows up and they want to sit down and have lunch with their kids, meanwhile, that you open up the whale on it smells really bad. If we could provide the scratch and sniff we probably wouldn't have.
Doug
What would that sticker actually smell like?
Alex
It depends on the whale.
Doug
How long does it take to get the stink off you?
Alex
Let me let me back up for a second and say if you're married or have a partner, it depends on whether you will be allowed home or not.
Sue
But if you have a dog, you might get really friendly with the dog.
Alex
It also depends on the species and how decomposed they're certainly a sperm whale, for example, general practice to burn your clothes afterwards. It also depends on how well you protected your clothes and how, let's say intimate you got with the mess that was in front of you. As you might imagine a perfectly press a lab coat doesn't come out looking very good once you climb out of a whale.
Doug
As you can tell, Sue and Alex have quite a sense of humor about their jobs. And this is often the case in death and trauma related fields. After all, death and humor aren't contrasting realities. They're two sides of the same emotional coin. Humor can help us navigate stressful environments and construct meaning of our lived experiences.
Alex
In our business. I think it's a natural defense mechanism. It helps you deal on a day to day basis. I would say we're also more and more coming to terms with the fact that it also helps us bury certain emotions
Sue
There there are strandings that stick with you. I mean, there are events that we have been involved in that you relive them, you know you really do, you will never forget them.
Doug
Humpback Whale calves are about 15 feet long when they're born and grow like weeds of the sea, fueled by their mother's milk, which is almost 50% fat. Every day. A calf grows one inch in length and gains 100 pounds. And as for mama she in her adult brethren each nom down 1 million calories every 24 hours. But we can't use a whale's appetite to our advantage. The giant creatures are guarded under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. As part of that we aren't allowed to do anything that would cause a whale to change their natural behaviors. This includes offering tasty treats to get a glimpse. And so we wait with watchful eyes.
And let me tell you friends, this is a group effort. So if you see something, say something.
Doug
In the distance that three miles of boardwalk hotel and restaurants of the Virginia Beach oceanfront stretch out along White Sands. If you squint, you can see two lighthouses down the shoreline, the smaller of which was commissioned by George Washington himself, the larger one is still in operation, guiding ships in and out of the bay. Silently beneath us. The boats depth finder sends a sonic pulse through the shadow black water, the depth 50 feet. A few blips here and there on the screen. show small fish passing by nothing else. We're 45 minutes in without a whale in sight. Let's talk rubbernecking. So there's a dead whale on a beach, a team of people cutting it up and taking samples and an excavator heaving up and moving around body parts. I mean, would you want to get a closer look?
Sue
You'd be amazed at how many people will come out and stay for hours while we work up an animal. We try to view these events as a chance to educate the public. And so you know, we often try to have volunteers and sometimes staff members actually setting up a perimeter and talking to people about what we're doing to see a Right Whale flipper hanging off of a off of a an excavator and tell someone you know that flipper probably weighs much more than a ton. You know, that's it's a cool thing or to take a slice of the of the fluke or the dorsal fin and show them the vessels and show them that the fluke doesn't have any bones in it. It's just made up of fibers and soft tissue. But it's an incredibly well designed piece of equipment. I mean, their evolution is fascinating. And so, you know, don't shy away from it. If you hear that there's a dead whale in your neighborhood. You know, we're out there to get people interested. And just for the sheer fascination of seeing one of these animals, whether it's whole or in pieces, they're just, they're amazing.
Doug
As good as the stranding response team has gotten to this whole getting rid of a dead whale thing. It's still a relatively new profession, and they're learning as they go. Mistakes have been made by stranding teams and other scientists around the globe. Some getting more public attention than others, like the infamous 1970 video of a whale carcass in Florence, Oregon. The solution? Dynamite. Soon after the explosion, the camera cuts out. That's because the crew had to run for safety as chunks of whale carcass rain down from the sky.
Sue
So yes, you don't blow it up. You don't burn it. You don't bury it whole because it will bloat and then and then reappear. It will also bloat then pop then cause a giant crater that apparently there are stories of vehicles falling into buried whale craters in the past. So yes, you cut it up into little pieces and bury it in a place where there isn't going to be anybody walking or driving vehicles or things like that for a little while.
Doug
You guys have graveyards for these whale parts? Where do you put all that stuff?
Sue
We'll never tell.
Alex
It really depends, again on several factors. So if it's a whale that we have chemically euthanized, then we don't want those tissues to be reachable by other wildlife or by someone's dog walking down the beach,
Sue
or near a water system
Alex
or water system so so those tissues will either get buried in line graves at places like landfills or they'll get cremated. Things like that depends on the size. It depends. local resources, what have you whales that were not chemical euthanized. We generally bury on scene or nearby
Sue
Military bases in the past had been a favorite because again, limited public access limited beachfront homes, usually plenty of space to bury, and often they have their own heavy equipment, parks, refuges.
Doug
But what about the whales who die out in the open ocean? I guess that makes the question why not just let the whale rot at sea?
Sue
Do you know how long it takes for a whale to rot at sea? It can take a very, very long time. And invariably, that whale ends up in a place where you don't want it to be. So carcasses that are really far offshore. Absolutely they stay for the most part unless there's a compelling reason to bring it into shore to examine it, they do stay offshore. But if it's within a couple of miles of the beach, it's going to end up most likely on a beach and, you know, kind of that Murphy's Law of strandings the least accessible, least appropriate place for it to land. It's going there, it's going to make everybody's life a lot easier if we can just tow this thing a mile down the beach and have it washed ashore in a in a less populated area where we know we can bury it 100 feet away.
Alex
In case it wasn’t obvious all of these lessons have been learned the hard way.
Sue
Not all of them by us personally but but we we do know a lot of stories.
Doug
What's the ultimate goal of collecting and sharing all this data
Sue
To effectively manage and conserve whale populations? You know, if we understand causes of death and we can identify and and and learn more about the interactions that lead to the death of these animals, then we can can as a community recommend management actions that might help to prevent mitigate, reduce all those those consequences. If we think they become entangled in gear because they can't see it, then we have to know what they can see before we can design a mitigation measure. That means that they can maybe avoid something it is.
Alex
It is an uncomfortable truth. The more you look into it, to realize how many of our daily activities that we take for granted so much have pretty significant impacts on these animals.
Sue
We all still maintain this little bit of hope that that all of this is not for nothing.
Doug
I got into this episode wondering who gets rid of dead whales and how did they do it? And then along the sharp afternoon suns reflection off the Atlantic. Something happened. Oh, there it is. Oh all any of us could do was gasp. I mean, on TV up a humpback whale is beautiful, but in person, it's almost paralyzing. A second slightly shorter spray shot up another humpback whale their backs lurched above the surface before shooting water from their blow holes 20 feet in the air. Then they sunk back under travel buddies. The waves were rough and I lost my footing a couple times as I reach for the ship's piping to keep me from falling over. In the ruckus I accidentally hit the stop button on my recorder. So I don't have audio for what I'm about to tell you. But it's seared in my memory. About 100 feet in front of us. One of the humpback whales breached flying 10 feet above the water before crashing back down in this splash that left a thick mist hovering over the choppy waters. I'm not sure a human brain can fully appreciate such a colossal thing without seeing it in person. It's like looking at a picture of the Grand Canyon versus being there staring out over its deep red expanse. Feeling the smallness of your hands by comparison, your legs, your feet, the tiny, human shaped perimeter you take up in this world. Right now, as you listen to this, somewhere beneath the sea, a whale is singing its song and that sound can carry on for miles. May it always carry on?
To learn more about the Virginia Beach stranding response team and offer your support visit the links provided in the show notes. And a special thanks to Brennan Tap for assisting in the field recordings of this episode. If you have any questions, comments or ideas for future episodes, email me at curious@quickanddirtytips.com. If you prefer talking over typing, leave me a voicemail at 757-541-8471 For more information about the show and where you can find us across the internet. And check out our show notes or visit quickanddirtytips.com Special thanks to the quick and dirty tips team, Adam Cecil our audience development and podcast manager, Morgan Christiansen podcast and advertising Operations Specialist, Holly Hutchings, our digital Operations Specialist, Davina Tomlin, marketing and publicity assistant, and our trusty intern Brendan Picha. Curious State is hosted and produced by me Doug Fraser for the Quick and Dirty Tips network, which is a division of Macmillan publishers in partnership with Mignon Fogarty Inc. Until next time, stay curious.