Thar she blows! Boats away boys, away!
Posted on 06/12/2007 3:38:41 PM PDT by 11th_VA
BOSTON - A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt — more than a century ago. Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3 1/2-inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale's age, estimated between 115 and 130 years old.
"No other finding has been this precise," said John Bockstoce, an adjunct curator of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
Calculating a whale's age can be difficult, and is usually gauged by amino acids in the eye lenses. It's rare to find one that has lived more than a century, but experts say the oldest were close to 200 years old.
The bomb lance fragment, lodged a bone between the whale's neck and shoulder blade, was likely manufactured in New Bedford, on the southeast coast of Massachusetts, a major whaling center at that time, Bockstoce said.
It was probably shot at the whale from a heavy shoulder gun around 1890. The small metal cylinder was filled with explosives fitted with a time-delay fuse so it would explode seconds after it was shot into the whale. The bomb lance was meant to kill the whale immediately and prevent it from escaping.
The device exploded and probably injured the whale, Bockstoce said.
"It probably hurt the whale, or annoyed him, but it hit him in a non-lethal place," he said. "He couldn't have been that bothered if he lived for another 100 years."
The whale harkens back to far different era. If 130 years old, it would have been born in 1877, the year Rutherford B. Hayes was sworn in as president, when federal Reconstruction troops withdrew from the South and when Thomas Edison unveiled his newest invention, the phonograph.
The 49-foot male whale died when it was shot with a similar projectile last month, and the older device was found buried beneath its blubber as hunters carved it with a chain saw for harvesting.
"It's unusual to find old things like that in whales, and I knew immediately that it was quite old by its shape," said Craig George, a wildlife biologist for the North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management, who was called down to the site soon after it was found.
The revelation led George to return to a similar piece found in a whale hunted near St. Lawrence Island in 1980, which he sent to Bockstoce to compare.
"We didn't make anything of it at the time, and no one had any idea about their lifespan, or speculated that a bowhead could be that old," George said.
Bockstoce said he was impressed by notches carved into the head of the arrow used in the 19th century hunt, a traditional way for the Alaskan hunters to indicate ownership of the whale.
Whaling has always been a prominent source of food for Alaskans, and is monitored by the International Whaling Commission. A hunting quota for the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission was recently renewed, allowing 255 whales to be harvested by 10 Alaskan villages over five years.
After it is analyzed, the fragment will be displayed at the Inupiat Heritage Center in Barrow, Alaska.
Nice teeth on Moby Dick...
I don't know. The Alaskan natives hunt of whales is a tradition. Certain species did not become endangered because of these natives hunting proclivities (thank modern man).
I don't know the lifespan of whales but it has never been uncommon for a predator to attack a weak (young, injured or old) prey. The hunt of these whales appears to be monitored and sanctioned (thus the "bag" limit). I do wonder at the age of some of the whales that were killed with this device 130 years ago.
“The bomb lance fragment, lodged a bone between the whale’s neck and shoulder blade”
That whale probably always knew when the weather was about to change.
Hopefully, not in a Clintonian sense!
Ew!
Melville went to such great lengths to insure his masterpiece rang true, then Hollywood goes and slaps some cheesy dinosaur teeth on his sperm whale... *sigh*
Elizabeth Hasselbeck hit that particular whale in a ‘non-lethal’ spot, as well.
Yeah, but in that case, she smacked the whale and the whale is now being courted by NBC for a new show.
Go fig.
OMG, you’re right! Good thing I didn’t direct that movie, huh? I would had Moby Dick looking like a baleen whale, lol.
Thar she blows! Boats away boys, away!
Thar she blows! Boats away boys, away!
Uuhhh, Inupit indians were using explosive harpoons to hunt anything in 1890?
Should this piece of someone's heritage not return to New Bedford instead?
Moby Dick, Chapter 58
ROFLOL !!!
I bet that was a pain in the neck
on what other thread could I possibly invoke a reference to a “Nantucket Sleighride?”
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