Kicking Out the Whale Bone Squatters - Hakai Institute
Kicking Out the Whale Bone Squatters
Some critters help clean whale bones, others just want free lodging.
When you have a tough cleaning job, you call in professionals. But what if a hovering horde of tenants in search of free rent move in before the cleaning is done?
The skeleton of a juvenile humpback whale that washed ashore near our Calvert Island Ecological Observatory in May 2019 needed a deep clean before being reassembled. We hung the bones off our dock, safely encased in thick, tough nets, and let the nearshore scavengers and decomposers remove as much of the remaining flesh as possible.
When skeleton articulator Mike de Roos and his crew members Katie Ford and Claire Schiller hauled the bones to the surface months later, they found an amazing array of marine critters had settled in the free space.
After a whole lot of additional elbow grease from the crew, the bones were packaged up and barged south to Salt Spring Island for the next stage in their long cleaning saga—a full degreasing. We’re filming that too, so stay tuned.
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