9.
THE OCEAN’S UTMOST BONES
There is a set of unassuming warehouses in Prince George’s County, Maryland, which holds secrets of immeasurable value. The corrugated metal sheds stand at the end of a nondescript asphalt road, where the Smithsonian keeps its off-site collections, including Apollo-era spacecraft and planes from both world wars. They also house the focus of my life’s work and that of many others: thousands upon thousands of whale bones from nearly every species alive today, and many long extinct. These vaults hold an archive of past whale worlds, ranging from geologic to historical times, that has no equal anywhere else.
Once inside, the smell is the first thing you’ll notice: a latent oil odor hangs in the air, still emanating from century-old skeletons. Rows of steel shelves hold the full series of vertebrae from the largest whales—the neck, chest, lumbar, and tail bones of blue whales, fin whales, right whales, and sperm whales—all stacked like giant dominoes and wedged in archival foam. The natural oil that still lingers in these skeletons smells like a thousand wax candles charged with smoke and seaweed. For me, this dense and heady smell conjures memories and associations about these bones that have formed over years of study. When I notice the smell laced in clothes or on my hands, it reminds me that, for any question about whales, there is probably a specimen in this collection that could answer it.
Metal frames line the floor, ten to twenty feet tall, each with skulls and jaws lashed to its structure, mounted upright. Casters allow one person to move the enormous specimens with comparative ease. These specimens, and the thousands of bones housed in cabinets and resting on shelving, represent a physical record of nearly every whale species alive today, including some yet to be named. (Yes, there are still new mammal species to be formally named in the twenty-first century.) A large portion of the fossil whale collection at the Smithsonian is stored here, providing perhaps the only place in the world where the skulls of a blue whale, a fin whale, and a number of other gigantic whale species can be compared side by side with those of their long-extinct fossil relatives. With vertebrae the size of desks, jaws as large as telephone poles, and skulls that wouldn’t fit inside a city apartment, the chain of human effort to bring just one of these items to the museum from its point of discovery is almost too exhausting to contemplate. Multiply that single custody chain by tens of thousands of specimens over 150 years, and the cumulative effort is staggering.
There is one whale specimen, however, that stands apart from the rest. USNM 268731 is the catalog number for the right and left jawbones of the largest blue whale specimen in any museum in the world—I’ve looked for and measured all other possible contenders. Nearly twenty-three feet long, each weighing about a ton dry weight, the bones rest horizontally on the largest custom metal frames in the collection. Neither would slide easily through any kind of normal front door; it takes half a dozen strides and a few breaths just to walk their length. Bladelike terminations mark where the two would meet to form the whale’s chin. (Our own right and left jaws are fused at the chin as a bony symphysis by the time we are born.) At the top of each jawbone is a fine peak, called the coronoid process, which provides an attachment, in life, for a set of straplike muscles that pull the jaw toward the skull. Two large bumps nearby, on the other end, anchor the jaws into the skull itself.
USNM 268731
Bones this large seem improbable; it is hard to wrap your mind around something the height of a football field goalpost attached to a moving, breathing being. In all of their fundamental dimensions—length, width, height, and weight—these bones are larger than the biggest mammoth tusks or the bones belonging to the largest dinosaurs. Blue whale jawbones are not just the ocean’s utmost bones (to borrow from Melville) but the utmost bones in the history of life on Earth. Of course, they did not just appear in the museum, as if fabricated out of some incredible special-effects studio. They have an origin story, like every other specimen in the museum’s collection. And in this case the story begins on an island in the middle of the Southern Ocean, about a hundred years ago.
The Drake Passage, a stretch of churning, frigid, and perilous seas, stretches between the southern tip of South America and the craggy archipelago of the western Antarctic Peninsula. It formed some thirty million years ago as the tectonic plates of South America and Antarctica separated, finally giving way to a continuous current system that now rings Antarctica. The Circum-Antarctic Current is unimpeded by any landform, allowing wind and waves to build incredible force, keeping albatrosses aloft and menacing navigators for centuries. This current also keeps Antarctica refrigerated and fuels the rich ecosystems that support krill, whales, seals, and penguins.
For those fortunate (or crazy) enough to cross the Drake, the immense heave and pull that you feel under your feet, or the towering waves that rattle even the sturdiest vessel, remind you that we live on a planet that frequently defies our attempts to control it. After an ill-fated expedition to cross Antarctica on foot in 1914, the explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew were marooned on an island at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Crossing the Drake in open boats would’ve been folly; instead, he and his crew aimed for South Georgia, nearly eight hundred miles away to the east—with the current, not against it. In a feat of survival essentially unparalleled in the modern age, Shackleton landed with his men on the south side of the island before making the first-ever inland crossing of the glaciated island. Exhausted but unbowed, Shackleton sought a place on the east side where he knew he could find help: a whaling station.
It’s as unlikely a place as you might imagine for one whaling station, let alone the several that existed at South Georgia in the early twentieth century. At the time, each was more like a small port town, with barracks, administrative offices, churches, and, of course, factories specially designed to pull whole whale carcasses out of the water for rendering. The names for these stations conveyed claims from nations a world away—Stromness, Prince Olav, and Grytviken—and operated under companies with different flags, including Norwegian, British, and Argentine. Today these abandoned whaling stations are protected heritage sites under British territorial claim. But in the early twentieth century these ports were filled with smells and sights from the most massive sustained whale hunts in history, pushing many whale species in the Southern Hemisphere to the edge of extinction.
South Georgia’s heyday was brief, elapsing between two technological innovations: in 1864 the deck-mounted explosive harpoon made whaling much more lethally efficient, and in the late 1920s gigantic factory ships freed whalers from the need to process their catch on land. As a seamount, the island’s underwater topography created a local upwelling that naturally attracted an abundance of whales nearby—in the thousands, so many that whalers could hear their blows echoing throughout the harbor. Lacking any kind of restrictions, whalers devastated the locally abundant whales and then pursued whales farther afield in the great Southern Ocean. At its end, Southern Ocean whaling in the twentieth century accounted for over two million of the more than three million whales killed last century.
The scope of this undertaking, which began on a remote island, is difficult for us to grasp today, but it rivals more widely known exterminations on land, like those of the American bison and the passenger pigeon. Shackleton’s photographer, Frank Hurley, left a legacy of images collected on the expedition’s initial leg southward, showing Grytviken with corrugated tin sheds next to long, wide flensing platforms, like airport tarmacs, tilted into the harbor. Ice fields and jagged hillsides rise dramatically in the background. The enormous whale carcasses in the foreground are startling: in one photo, a nearly hundred-foot-long blue whale dwarfs the gaggle of men beside it. Few people alive today, if any, can relate to the sight of a carcass that massive. While only about 150 blue whales were ever killed at these lengths, over 325,000 blue whales of all sizes were killed during Southern Ocean whaling in the twentieth century; today blue whales are a rare sight in these waters. It’s quite possible that the gigantic, limit-pushing blue whales have had their genes removed from the population by whaling. At the least, it will take a few more decades for any surviving calves from that era, now fully mature adults, to reach the lengths of their ancestors.
While commercial whaling took a colossal and unprecedented toll on many species, it also provided unique information, creating an uneasy intersection between interests. Whaling—across geographic and temporal scopes—has given us a lot of basic biology about whales that we would not know otherwise. The sheer scale of industrial whaling was a lethal way to sample whale diversity across the world’s oceans. The tabulations and maps generated out of this killing provide some estimation of what whales lived in which oceans at a specific time. Very few of these physical vouchers ever made it to a museum; whaling in the twentieth century was about profit, in the form of oil and meat. But the occurrence data for each recorded kill—which species, where it was harpooned, and when, like a waypoint—also provide an account of whale biodiversity in the early twentieth century that we will never get again. (We do know that these data aren’t entirely unbiased. Soviet whalers, especially in the North Pacific, consistently underreported their whaling catch statistics for decades.)
Whaling has also provided us with volumes of anatomical data. For example, our sources for total body weights, organ weights, length data, and relative timing of age to physical maturity for a variety of large whale species is derived from the whaling industry. There are also details about reproduction (birth rate and gestation based on ovary data, for example) and diet (based on gut contents—a last meal), which permit the identification of prey species in a precise and quantitative way. At the height of whaling at South Georgia in the 1920s, many of the size measurements (such as total length or girth at the pectoral flippers) became standardized, giving this kind of reporting comparability and repeatability. Sometimes even data about parasites, outside and inside the body, were collected.
To support an industry of empire, the British government formalized data collection about whale landings when it convened the Discovery Investigations from 1918 to 1951. The output of this scientific inquiry into Antarctic whaling—organizing and analyzing whale data and their oceanographic context—weighed in at thirty-seven volumes and was made publicly available. The Discovery Reports are scientific proceedings, but they also reveal the immense scale of the logistics involved in the hunts and the hardships of living and working at sea or on a remote island. When I page through the Discovery Reports, full of tabulations, sepia photos, and line drawings, I wonder whether the scientists who collected these data recognized that the chance to do so would never happen again.
One person who would have pored over the Reports at the time of their publication was my direct predecessor at the Smithsonian, Remington Kellogg. I inhabit a world he created: as the current curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian, I am the steward of the collections that he largely built. It is the largest collection of its kind in the world (by a fair margin, measured both in sheer tonnage and in variety of extinct branches of the whale family tree). Much of it was collected, handled, and contemplated by Kellogg over the course of forty years at the National Museum. It’s a rare day that I don’t pause at his contorted penmanship in India ink on brittle paper in a specimen drawer. His legacy, however, also includes the fact that he was instrumental in founding the International Whaling Commission in 1946 and served as a kind of science diplomat representing the United States at the IWC until shortly before his death in 1969.
Kellogg was well aware that some whale species, such as North Atlantic right whales, had been devastated by Yankee whaling less than a century before, and that other species, such as gray whales, were on the edge of extinction in the early twentieth century. He successfully marshaled his colleagues to enact the first multinational prohibitions for any further hunting of right whales and gray whales in 1937 (with the organization that presaged the IWC), but the scale of what Kellogg faced in the post–World War II years of whaling far outstripped anything that happened in the nineteenth century.
In theory, the IWC was meant to regulate the killing of whales; in practice, the IWC functioned more like an international hunting club. Nations managed whales as resources, the way many fisheries do today, and for most member nations the influence of the whaling industry outweighed any scientific interest in whales. To a degree, ignorance served their aims: if no one really knew how many whales there were in the oceans, there was no reason to abate the hunts. Kellogg’s opposition was paid little heed. By the time of his death, well over two million large whales had been killed; there may have been only a few thousand blue whales left on the planet, less than 1 percent of their population at the outset of whaling. The scale of this loss of biomass in the oceans has no historical precedent. We live in a world with far fewer whales than our grandparents, and certainly than the world of our great-grandparents. The ecological consequences of this scarcity are still poorly understood.
Kellogg’s role in the failures of the IWC during the midtwentieth century—especially as a paleontologist-turned-diplomat—confounds and frustrates me. His portraits depict him true to his bureaucratic type: posed at a large desk, with a specimen in hand, eyes glaring from a dour face. Were the endless, quiet hours of committee work and travel a matter of pride in the service of scientific diplomacy? Or did the shortcomings of diplomacy eat away at him? We know little about any of his personal thoughts about whaling. His written reflections are dry and devoid of personal asides, sadly barren of the colorful language he used in the workplace, which dominates the memory of the handful of people I know who talked to him. While some superficial details about Kellogg appeal to me, they still don’t help me understand him. Nor help to answer the questions that I want to know more than the others: What would I have done in his shoes? Was there anything to change about the fate of whales on Earth had I been in his place, at his time?
I ask myself that whenever I pass by the bones of USNM 268731 in the warehouses. The jaws of this massive, unparalleled creature came to rest here thanks to rapacious greed that killed over 99 percent of all other whales like it. USNM 268731 belonged to a ninety-two-foot-long female blue whale, harpooned off east Antarctica in 1939 by the whaling ship Ulysses. The vessel was a factory ship over five hundred feet long that Norwegian whalers operated over several years with observers from the U.S. Coast Guard, logging thirty thousand cruise miles. One sharp-eyed inspector corresponded extensively with Kellogg about the specimen collection that the ship amassed. He, or someone like him, must have taken note of USNM 268731’s spectacular size, though we have no mention of these particular jawbones in anyone’s notes. How exactly USNM 268731’s jaws entered the collections—by boat, by crane, by truck—seems to be lost to history.
The best stories of scientific discovery are, at their heart, stories about people. There’s no doubt that the facts of science are exacting and objective. But the narrative of how we figure out true things about the world is not necessarily clean and tidy. That’s because scientists are real people too, with inner lives that sometimes bear on their work. Scientific discoveries happen in a social context, and they can be as much a matter of happenstance as the friendships we form.
Jeremy Goldbogen is one such friend who has profoundly influenced my life and my science. Jeremy is quiet and contemplative in the moments when I am loud and rash; I relish making him snicker over a profane joke. Although we have different skill sets—he’s now a leading researcher in the discipline of biomechanics, or the physics of how organisms function—our careers have been closely braided, with lab work and fieldwork around the world tagging, dissecting, and digging whales. Friendships have origin stories too, and our shared quest to understand how whales became giants of the sea started on a walk in San Diego.
On a break from one of my first field seasons at Sharktooth Hill, I met Jeremy through a mutual friend in San Diego. Like me, Jeremy was wrestling with the insecurity of not knowing exactly what to study, but his problems were far away from bones. He had recently received a set of data from one of the first generation of suction-cupped tags deployed on rorquals just off the coast nearby—his colleagues had hoped to collect whales singing but instead found them feeding. At the time, no one had recognized that the tags recorded a trove of biomechanical data that could be inferred from changes in the speed of these feeding whales, but Jeremy would be among the first to figure that out.
One day on a walk to grab tacos for lunch, Jeremy asked me how hard it is to measure rorqual jaws. I replied that besides finding a long enough tape measure, it was mostly a matter of legwork and a strong back. But Jeremy was thinking more broadly about measuring energy; when these massive animals lunge with mouths agape, water loaded with prey pours in, generating drag at a major energetic cost. Because jawbones delimit the size of whale mouths, Jeremy figured we could theoretically use bone measurements to put real numbers on how much water these whales engulfed during a single lunge. Those data, combined with tag data from their feeding bouts underwater, would give us key information about the energetic trade-offs involved with lunge feeding. Within a few months, we pooled together some small graduate student travel grants and headed to the Smithsonian—a place that could help provide exactly that kind of information.
My quip to Jeremy aside, measuring whale bones is hard work. I envy my colleagues who work on land mammals, or even large reptiles—they don’t need forestry calipers, transect tapes, ladders, and forklifts to take simple linear measurements of their study materials. Even elephant bones don’t rival those of a large whale. Just measuring the length, width, height, or circumference of the bones and skulls of rorqual whales, even the smaller ones, requires thick foam blocks, moving straps, and all the coordination you’d need to move furniture. (Bring gloves; ditch the nice shoes.) It’s minimally a two-person operation most of the time—something that Jeremy and I learned firsthand with our first visit to the Smithsonian.
Over the course of two weeks in the warehouses, we managed to measure every rorqual jawbone we could find, for a variety of rorqual species, small, medium, and large. One fact we determined out of data collection was that bigger jaws had less of a mechanical advantage than smaller ones. In other words, based on the simple lever mechanics of where the jaw muscles would pull on the jawbone, larger rorquals should spend more effort closing their jaws, a bit like lifting a bucket of water with a broom by holding it at its end versus somewhere down the middle. That made sense in terms of behavior: smaller rorquals, such as minkes, eat quicker prey and need to shut their mouths faster than blue whales, for example, which can afford to close their mouths more slowly around larger and slower-escaping swarms of krill. In life, it may have taken USNM 268731’s ninety-two-foot-long owner as long as ten seconds to open and close its mouth around a volume of water equal to an entire lane of an Olympic-size swimming pool. The drop in mechanical advantage at this upper limit made us wonder about the limits to living life as a rorqual whale.
Jeremy turned to the Discovery Reports, to table after table of raw whaling station measurements, a grind of library work and hunt-and-peck accounting. He thumbed through every paper and every table in the whole series to find numbers directly comparable to those we collected in museum collections, such as jaw length, as well as others that could be measured only in the flesh, such as body length and the distance between the dorsal fin and tail fluke. (The most comprehensive series of measurements in the Reports were limited to fin whales.) Jeremy found that bigger fin whales could hold even more water in their mouths than you would expect for their body size. Assuming this pattern held for other rorqual species, it pointed to what was likely a benefit of being large as a lunge-feeding whale—the bigger the better. Commonsense logic added: to a point. There must be a trade-off for being big: benefits, but also limits.
Was something else at work here, something more than we could discern from dry bones and numbers? It was a bit like trying to know a bat from either its flight path or its skeleton without context—in either case, there is no substitute for seeing the skin of its wings and watching how it moves through the air. What we really wanted to know was how whales open their mouths underwater, nearly ninety degrees wide, to engulf a cloud of prey as large as their entire body in just a few seconds—and do it successfully many, many times every day. How do straplike jaw muscles control that movement? What happens, for instance, with the muscles that form the floor of the mouth? All of these questions required getting close to a whale in the flesh. We needed to see the whole organism to understand the muscles, nerves, and flesh that fire the amazing process of lunge feeding. Not just data points and bones.