Notes on a Sperm Whale Stranding in New Zealand

November, 2003

When I returned on Sunday night from a weekend of camping, an urgent message was waiting from Steve.  Twelve sperm whales had stranded west of Auckland on the stretch of beach (over about 7km) between Whatipu and Karekare, and someone from New Zealand's Department of Conservation (DoC) had called Steve to ask if he was interested in stomach content analysis.  Sperm whales eat 800-1000 large squid per day and the beaks accumulate in the second stomach (of three); the first is quite muscular and restrains prey until its struggles are over, then the second is where the digestive juice comes in, and the flesh dissolves quite quickly but the beaks remain.  The third is basically just a wide beginning to the intestines. 

Previously stomach contents were only known from one sperm whale in New Zealand that stranded in the '60s; we also have unsorted contents from a young male that stranded last year on Mahia Peninsula, north of Napier.  So this was an opportunity to expand the collections twelvefold.  By examining the beaks in the stomach, it is possible to determine what squid species the whale has been feeding on in the past several days, and extrapolate where it may have been.

At 8am on Monday we drove out to the beach, which is quite remote, and met the DoC staff in the parking lot.  They were ferrying people around on four-wheelers, as long as the tide was out -- there's a stretch of rocks you can walk over at high tide, but motor vehicles are stuck on one side or the other until low tide.  They took us out to where the whales were and briefed us on the general situation and plan, as follows:  the whales ranged from 40-60 feet in length, and were all males.  No idea why they'd stranded.  They'd been reported Saturday morning (two days earlier), at which point some were still alive, but all had subsequently died or been euthanized; like elephants, after lying down (on land) for a few hours their internal organs begin to collapse under their own weight.  They were unable to refloat any of them, so the twelve carcasses were being prepared for disposal; DoC had a crew of about 20 people on site to handle the clean-up.  The lower jaws (upper jaws have no teeth) were to be removed for the local Maori, who according to local land rights have the right to them.  If DoC had not removed the jaws prior to burial, they would have been dug up later and removed with considerable mutilation -- a single tooth is worth ~ NZ$1500 and there are 50 per jaw.  So they decided, better to do it cleanly and avoid the trouble.  As it was, despite security measures taken to keep people off the beach, someone snuck in and chainsawed off the tip of one jaw, getting away with ~10 teeth. 

So the first order of business was removal of the jaws.  They had two diggers on the beach and had dragged the ten smaller males up out of the reach of the tide; one large bull was still in the surf, and another was right at tideline but too heavy to move in one piece.  To remove the jaws, they cut the musculature surrounding the attachment points (a sperm whale jaw looks like a Y, with the stem/tooth part being ~ 8' long and about 18" wide, and the two wings attaching to the head), then pulled the jaw off with one of the diggers. 

An aside on general first impressions of the whales.  A 40' whale on its side is about 6' high.  A 60' whale on its side is about 8' high.  There is a LOT of juice in an animal that size, and standing next to them, you could hear them decomposing... the sun had fried the outer skin, which was coming off in dry crinkly shreds.  Each animal had a constant stream of blood running out of it in at least one spot.  They also had an unbelievable quantity of oil, which you could hear crackling under the black skin, and which dripped out onto the beach and made slimy rivers of congealed fat oozing down the beach.  To avoid problems with bloating and explosion when the animals were eventually cut open, DoC had made a slit in the whales' backs, behind the dorsal fin, through which some of the innards were protruding, forced out by heat and expanding gas.  Some of the animals had the scarring on their heads we were looking for -- giant squid (Architeuthis) sucker marks and colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis) scratches.  We got photos and skin samples of these.  The removal of the jaws left them looking pretty mutilated, with the tongues hanging out.  Most had blood on the roofs of their mouths, possibly from the jaws being ground around in the sand and surf.

After the jaws were secure, we were allowed to do the stomach contents.  Because the emphasis on Monday was on the jaws primarily, we only got the chance to do one whale -- the DoC personnel were busy elsewhere, so we had to do our own cutting.  Here's what's involved in retrieving the stomach contents of a sperm whale.  You make a window in the whale's abdomen about 6' by 6', folding the flap of muscle (>12" thick) down.  To cut through the abdomen, you have to use a combination of the following: 2' flensing blade on 4' handle; smaller flensing blade; machete; large hunting knife; various kitchen knives.  A knife used to cut whale tissue on a beach where sand is blowing around is dull in under two minutes, so you have to have someone sharpening knives for you.  Once you begin to cut the tissue and actually pierce the abdominal cavity, you have to be ready to jump out of the way, because a variety of things are built up inside that want to escape - gases, juice, intestines.  When you hear a telltale gurgle from inside, you get out of the way.  Then you continue cutting, releasing the pressure in (hopefully) manageable amounts.  You also have to be ready to turn your head to the side and gag, frequently, because as rancid as the sickly sweet smell of dead whale is from the outside, the inside is ten times worse -- it's a combination of rotting blood and tissue, digestive gases, bile, and heated oil.  I will never forget it.

When you have the window pulled open, you are faced with a variety of sacs and a lot of intestine.  Since there are no diagrams available on sperm whale anatomy that would be useful in finding the stomach of a beached one, we were on our own.  We decided, on that first one, to follow the intestines, which must surely lead to the stomach (and hope we were following them the right way).  Catch: a sperm whale has 215 meters of intestine the thickness of a human leg (and full of material you don't even want to think about).  That's a lot to pull out.  But we did, to get our bearings on where we might (more easily) find the stomachs in the future.  In that first specimen, the stomach was totally empty, but in retrospect we think we might have been looking in the first stomach - the ones we looked at later had different linings, so we may not have recognized what we were looking for at first.

By the end of Monday, DoC had finished the jaws and collected them, and positioned the whales where they wanted them before burial.  They had dug two pits and pulled the whale we examined up the beach to the edge of its pit (where we did the examination).  They then got the digger in behind it, pushed it into the pit (which had filled with water) and bulldozed sand around and over it.  There were problems later with several whales floating in the water that filled the pits, so the digger had to hold them down while the dozer buried them.

Tuesday.  We promised to meet DoC on the beach at 7.30, so Steve picked me up at 6.30 and we went out west.  When we got to the parking lot, it turned out they were flying people in (high tide) with a helicopter, so we happened to fit in with another set of personnel and got flown in.  (Don't think I had been in a chopper since I was 4 or 5.  I loved it!  Steve hated it, and vowed never to fly in one again.)

Over the course of Tuesday we got into the stomachs of ten of the other whales.  We were unable to do the big bull that was still in the surf, but we got all the others done.  They had decided to take the skeleton from that one anyway (no small task) and clean it up for display at the National Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington.

We were required to wear protective gear, which included plastic disposable coverall jumpsuits, knee-high gumboots, heavy-duty waterproof hurricane overalls, latex gloves, and heavy-duty rubber elbow gloves.  Steve made a habit of getting into the whale up to (and past) the shoulder, and flooded his heavy-duty gloves so many times that by noon he had given up on them and went in bare to the elbow.  When he took off his coverall later, he had blood from his right wrist to the left side of his torso, and from feet to knees.  They made him wash in the ocean and put on a fresh coverall, for all the good it did...

Our experience with the first whale gave us a general idea of where to find the stomachs subsequently, we thought, but as it turned out the stomachs of beached whales can be anywhere from gassing out at the mouth, to nestled up in the ribcage, to midway down the abdomen, to hidden in the midst of the intestines.  We found them all over.  But opening them up, we got anywhere from five to half a bucketful of (several thousand) squid beaks, which are now being fixed in formalin, and are stacked in one foul-smelling corner of the office.  We have not had a chance to examine them yet but are fairly confident we saw some mid-size (not really huge) Architeuthis (giant squid) and Mesonychoteuthis (colossal) in there. 

By afternoon on Tuesday, we were mostly used to the smells, and kind of numb to the reality of what we were doing, and were able to get through them pretty quickly.  Fortunately the wind had died down a little -- morning was a mild sandstorm and you had to decide whether you wanted to shelter behind a whale, see, and not be able to breathe because of the stench, or stand in the wind, be blinded, and be able to breathe.  We were fortunate in that Monday was overcast, so the whales didn't really start to cook until Tuesday, and on Tuesday the wind did make certain spots bearable to stand in.

Afterward I went home and had a bath with baking soda, and two showers, but was still (in my partner's opinion, which I trust) unfit to go to dance class on Wednesday night.  I think I was bearable again by Thursday (several more showers later).  My clothes are still hanging outside and the jury's out on whether my backpack will ever be usable again.  Steve, however, still wafts out a faint whale-y aroma every once in a while when you stand near him.  It's incredible.

So overall, the experience was sad, horrific, interesting, infinitely valuable, and one I am glad to have behind me.  NZ only gets sperm whale strandings about once a decade, and Steve is already looking forward to the next one (for scientific reasons) but I will be quite happy to look at stomach contents in the future that have been collected by some other Jonah.