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.
If I were an Alaskan native I might think you implied that I’m not a modern man but some sort of caveman. I’d have to hop in my Geico insured whaling boat and come down to the 48 to harpoon your butt. You and your damn opposed thumbs!
Call me Ishmael...
Like you mean, "Lizzie Borden took a bomb lance and gave her mother..."?
Oh, wait. How about "finder's keepers"?
Alas, with the explosive technology, there were fewer and fewer "Nantucket Sleigh Rides". The whale might have a chance, then.
There is at least one grainy b&w film of one. Quite the ride, unlike the fungineers' "We're whalers on the Moon" ride.
All the more reason to ban commercial whaling.
I have always subscribed to the "Finite Heartbeat" theory. Ergo - the less one exercises, the longer one will live.
Please also refer to my published works on the "Finite Bowel Movement" and "Finite Ejaculation" theories.
I tell you, Battlegear-- The smartest people on the planet are the Freepers!
May I be excused?
My stomach is in knots.
Consider them both, Hollywood and Melville. And do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in your soul there lies a love of truth truth, a search for meaning, a quest for that which has the ring of truth. God keep thee!
You may be excused, but why is your stomach in knots? And are the knots easily untied, wet or dry, and with one hand, even unseen as when under water?
Sperm whales have teeth, and the ones in the picture are fairly authentic-looking.
It's because me mother was a mermaid, me father was King Neptune.
I was born on the crest of a wave and rocked in the cradle of the deep.
Seaweed and barnacles is me clothes.
The hair on me head is hemp, every tooth in me head is a marlinspike (which I use to untie knots), every bone in me body is a spar, and when I spits, I spits tar.
That's why matey!
I'm hard I am I is I arggggh!
The Greenland Whale Fisheries
(trad arr. Back of the Moon, on our 1st album ‘Gillian Frame and Back of the Moon’)
Greenland is a hell of a place
It’s a place that’s seldom green
Where there’s ice and snow, and the Whale fishes blow
And the daylight’s seldom seen brave boys
And the daylight’s seldom seen
In eighteen hundred seen and sixty three
On June the thirteenth day
Our gallant ship her anchor weighed
And for Greenland sailed away brave boys
For Greenland sailed away
Our Captain he stood on the quarter deck
With a spy glass in his hand
There’s a whale, there’s a whale, there’s a bloody great whale
And she blows on every span brave boys
And she blows on every span
We hit that whale and the line paid out
But she made a flunder with her tail
And the boat capsized and ten men were drowned
And we ne’er did catch that whale brave boys
And we ne’er did catch that whale
The loosing of those ten brave men
It grieves my heart full sore
But the loosing of that bloody great whale
It grieves me ten times more brave boys
It grieves me ten times more
When the ship is moored and safe secured
And all tied up on shore
We’ll all raise a glass take a bonny willing lass
And make this ale hoose roar Brave boys
And Make this ale hoose roar
Guess not, huh.
Talk about ‘the one that got away’!
The Associated Press strikes again. If this centurion whale had been killed (excuse me, "caught") by a non "indigenous person", what do you think the AP headline would be? I really hate the AP. The AP really does think people don't notice these things.
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