How the ROM shipped a rare blue whale across the country

Join EQ Bank in our effort to help bring a blue whale to the Royal Ontario Museum. As you read below about the rare bones of a blue whale making a trip across Canada to the ROM, consider a donation to the museum to help fund this important exhibition. A $40 donation will get your name printed on a massive installation that will be displayed prominently at the ROM. To make a donation, visit rom.on.ca/makeasplash.

Dr. Mark Engstrom doesn’t necessarily find whales more compelling than other animals.

“Rodents are just as interesting, I’d argue,” remarked the senior curator and Deputy Director of Collections and Research at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), specifically referencing bats.

Yet Engstrom took an epic journey across the country, to the shores of Newfoundland and back, to retrieve the bones of an 80-tonne blue whale for a special exhibition at the ROM.  He did it to point the public’s attention toward the oceans, because whales are what he calls “a charismatic example” of ocean life.

“If we can save whales, we can save a lot of the marine environment,” said Engstrom.

So the whales are key to raising awareness about ocean conservation.

His mission to bring back the bones of the gigantic whale began in 2014, when a pair of blue whales washed ashore near two small Newfoundland beach communities.

Once the bones were recovered, he plans to put them on display at the ROM and teach the general public about conserving the whale populations, and indirectly, the ocean.

His ultimate goal is to collect and display the bones of every large whale in Canada.

He had found other whale bones, like those of the Fin whale, but had yet to see a blue whale. So he needed to save the bones of the Newfoundland whales.

But part of that mission was transporting those massive bones from the edge of the country to downtown Toronto.

Here’s how he did it.

The first blue whale washed ashore in Trout River, and the second in nearby Rocky Harbour. The whales had come from a dwindling population of Atlantic Ocean whales that have been federally listed as endangered since 2002.

It was legitimately tragic. Scientists estimate there are only 200 to 250 of these whales remaining.

Still, when a whale dies and its carcass appears on a beach, it’s hard to think of anything other than the smell.

“There’s nothing that smells worse than a dead whale,” said Engstrom.

So began the rush to remove the whale from the beach. Fears that a buildup of gas inside the decomposing animal could cause it to spontaneously explode – possibly splattering its flesh, blubber and internal organs as far as 200 metres away. That meant the first obstacle was getting the whale somewhere away from the public.

First, Engstrom rented a tug boat big enough to carry the animal from the shore of Trout River to nearby Woody Point, Newfoundland.

Then, there was the gruesome matter of separating the whale matter from the bones.

“The way a whale is organized is there’s a thick layer of skin, a thick layer of blubber, then the muscle and then the organs and the bones,” said the ROM scientist. “We wanted to save the bones.”

The removal of the excess involved sawing, ripping, scrubbing and finally burying the bones in compost made up of a manure and sawdust mixture to digest and remove the remaining flesh stuck to the bone.

The manure, Engstrom noted, made the bones smell better.

“We also were not able to throw the stuff we weren’t keeping just anywhere. We had to haul it off to a landfill. So I had to get a permit to open up a new landfill, rent an excavator to dig a new hole, rent a dump truck to transport it,” said Engstrom.

In addition, he had to rent an 18-wheel, 16-metre refrigeration truck to keep the bones in, and a second one for the six-metre head.

“Everything requires heavy machinery. Everything,” he said.

Not only does moving a whale require heavy machinery, but extensive manpower. Engstrom hired four local Newfoundlanders, four employees of Research Casting International (a local dinosaur-mounting company) and his research crew from the museum to do the heavy lifting.

“Whatever bones we had removed, we would then tag, so we knew exactly what order they came off in, then put them in the refrigerated truck,” he said.

Needless to say, the road between Woody Point and Toronto was not all smooth.

“This is a big friggin’ animal, let’s put it that way,” Engstrom put plainly.

But here’s really how he did it.

Planning to move something as big as a blue whale from a beach in Newfoundland along the TransCanada highway to the biggest city in the country is, well, impossible.

And therein lies the secret to Engstrom’s success: being able to make it up as he goes along.

“You have to go there and wing it,” he said. “You can’t anticipate everything. You have to assess the situation when you get there and do it on the fly.”

Engstrom said he was prepared for all that moving a blue whale carcass entails – the stomach-turning smell, the enormity of the skull and literally tonnes of guts – but much of it was improvisation.

He said you have to approach each day with an entrepreneurial mind. Each problem is a detour to be navigated, not a roadblock.

“You have to have a can-do attitude,” he said. “That’s it.”