Old Man Whale

19th-century weapon found in whale

By ERIN CONROY, Associated Press Writer Tue Jun 12, 6:24 PM ET

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.
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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.
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Wow! What an old whale! Too bad, it did not survive this second attack. The ocean never ceases to amaze me. Ever since I began scuba diving in 1996, my respect for the marine environment has increased year on year. I learn something new all the time. But isn't it sad that we humans are destroying it more and more? Why is our appetite so voracious? Why can't we leave these beautiful animals alone? Do we have to eat these wonders of the world? Can our conscience not control our gastronomic urges? Why do the Alaskans and for that matter, the Japanese and Scandinavians have to hunt and eat whales?

Ever since I started diving, I had also stopped eating shark's fin. And....I don't miss it at all. At Chinese wedding dinners, this dish is usually served. I would now sit out this course. My family used to say,..........eat lah, this shark fin is fake anyway. Not the real stuff. My response is that it is a matter of principle for me, and more importantly, a matter of survival for the sharks. The harvesting of the fins is cruel. The sharks are still alive when their fins are hacked off. They are then thrown back into the sea to die a slow and painful death. So whether the fins are real or fake, folks need to be educated about this. So, I will say it one more time, "STOP EATING SHARK FIN" and "STOP HUNTING THE WHALES".