Blue Whale Project leader Andrew Trites looks at the vertebrae of a blue whale sitting outside the Beaty Biodiversity Museum at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver April 7, 2010.John Lehmann/ The Globe and Mail
It hangs majestically in the atrium of the new Beaty Biodiversity Museum in Vancouver, an exhibit born of thinking big and working relentlessly.
The skeleton of the 25-metre great blue whale, the largest animal ever to roam the planet, is suspended by just a few rods, poised dramatically in a lunge feeding position, its enormous jaw half open. The exhibit, which will be open to the public on May 22 for International Day of Biodiversity, is just one of two blue-whale displays in Canada, and the most accurate in the world.
Its sheer size inspires humility - and the effort behind its display is no less impressive.
The story began on the shores of P.E.I. in the winter of 1987. It was then, on a local beach, that residents of Nail Pond discovered a dead blue whale, which quickly became the talk and smell of the town. The Canadian Museum of Nature, which already had a Newfoundland blue whale in its collection, and the P.E.I. Department of Fisheries paid for the burial of the leviathan on nearby provincial land, preserving the remarkable specimen for future use.
A couple decades later, Andrew Trites, a professor at the University of British Columbia and the director of marine mammal research, was brainstorming for the centrepiece of the soon-to-open Beaty Biodiversity Museum on campus. It had been suggested to him that they could use a collection of marine mammal skeletal exhibits that he and master articulator Michael deRoos had already created. But Prof. Trites had bigger ideas - blue whale big.
But finding a spare dead blue whale is no easy task. Even Prof. Trites with his established network was about to give up, until an auspicious visit to the Canadian Museum of Nature in May, 2007. As a joke, he asked the curator if she happened to have a spare blue whale - and was told of the buried treasure.
Prof. Trites teamed up with Mr. deRoos for a three-day scouting mission. They arrived in P.E.I. on Dec. 6, 2007, with a small crew and a few local contacts. They anticipated what they might find - broken or rotted bones, or nothing at all. But they certainly weren't prepared for what they did discover: an intact blue whale.
"I was shocked to find the blue rubbery skin of the whale," Prof. Trites said. "As we cleared away the soil, there was just more and more whale. There was whale in every direction."
That night, the professor realized he was in over his head. Digging up bones was one thing, but surfacing and de-boning a 330,000-pound whale was well beyond the scope of his resources.
But the next day at the graveyard, they were met by a truckload of eager volunteers from Atlantic Veterinary College at the University of Prince Edward Island. The students came brandishing knives and bursting with excitement at the chance to be part of an historical scientific endeavour.
So with renewed inspiration, over lunch at a pizza place, the small group planned for their return trip.
Five months later, Prof. Trites and Mr. deRoos returned with a full support team and a well-thought-out plan to exhume and de-bone the whale. They started from the tail, and worked their way to the head. They were in for a surprise when they got to the mid-section: The left flipper was missing, with chainsaw marks at the joint.
For Prof. Trites, a prosthetic flipper contradicted the spirit of displaying a complete and authentic blue whale skeleton. While he was mulling over his options, a man appeared at the site looking "visibly nervous," the professor said.
The local man known as Junior brought Prof. Trites to his nearby house, where he presented him with the biggest flipper bone. And the rest of the 34 bones? He led Prof. Trites into the woods to the spot where he left the flipper remains 20 years ago. The two of them dug through the forest foliage and started finding bones - all but a couple of the very tiniest.
When Prof. Trites was trying to piece together the bones, he got the idea to take an X-ray of the intact flipper to determine the correct anatomy, something that had never been done before. So the blue whale was once again amputated, this time in the name of science.
Not long afterwards came more difficulty: The skull bone was shattered into hundreds of pieces - likely the result of a boat collision and the kiss of death for the whale. Mr. DeRoos tried everything to salvage it, but it wasn't possible.
"I didn't want to put someone else's head on our whale," Prof. Trites said.
But by this time, he said, "so many human stories had become part of the whale" that the whale had evolved beyond just a scientific specimen. So they commissioned a replica.
The drama didn't diminish when it came to degreasing the bones in Victoria.
Whale bones are porous and filled with fat used for flotation and fuel. The high pH and low oxygen burial conditions caused the fat to form a white waxy coating which turned out to be painstaking to remove. They were also working under a two-year deadline and had to invent (with help from biochemists at Michael Smith Laboratories) a new bio-enzymatic degreasing solution to expedite the process, and to remove the last of the rancid grease they rented an ex-U.S. Navy hot vapour degreaser.
Now, in the atrium of the Beaty museum, which is scheduled to open permanently in the fall (www.beatymuseum.ubc.ca), it is one week before the first public opening of the whale exhibit. Mr. deRoos has just four clean, non-smelly bones left to attach. He discusses their placement with Prof. Trites, who reflects on their epic journey.
It has been, he says, "the ultimate science project."