Residents of Trout River and neighboring town Rocky Harbor in Newfoundland will soon bid good riddance to the whale carcasses that have been rotting in their respective shores for a quite a while now.
The team from the Royal Ontario Museum began retrieving Thursday the bodies, which were believed to be among the nine casualties that were trapped in thick ice over a month ago.
Starting with the 76-feet long dead whale in Trout River, the team, together with 12 locals, got down to business and moved the body to Woody Point for the initial process of skinning that will probably take about five days, based on report of CTVNews.
The retrieval operations, however, was not an easy feat, as the netting of the adult female whale already took them about two half days.
"Assessing where it was in Trout River, it wasn't very easy to get to. It was near their board walk, near their main beach and we can't get any kind of machinery down there to help us. We can only work on it at certain points at a time," shared [video] Mark Engstrom, chief curator and deputy director for collections and research of the museum, in a Google+ Hangout conducted by the museum Thursday morning.
Engstrom was referring to the tide periods. They had to wait for high tide before towing away the whole carcass via a large fishing boat. "[The residents of Trout River] were concerned on the parts of the whale that they didn't want to go on the water," he added.
Upon reaching Woody Point, the team would remove the blubber and its muscle tissues, some of which will be collected to be made available to the scientific community from all parts of the globe immediately. As for the bones, interested researchers will have to wait until two to three years later.
Almost three weeks ago, Trout River was threatened by the extremely bloated dead whale that was expected to explode because of the gas from the decomposition that was trapped inside the whale. Luckily, it deflated in time but the rotting stench remained a nuisance among the locals.
Engstrom hopes that the complete skeleton will finally reach the museum in Toronto in two weeks, and then the team can set off to Rocky Harbor for another dead whale haul. However, they still have to figure out how to fit the hefty skull of the whale into the container they brought in.
In a nearby town of Cape St. George, residents tried to sell the 40-feet-long beached sperm whale on eBay after their pleas for help fell on deaf ears. The online auction attracted dozens of interested buyers but it was immediately put down by eBay after violating the site's rules.
In a statement, the Royal Ontario Museum said the death of the whales could be an "unprecedented opportunity to study one of the more endangered species of marine mammals." To date, the museum has no more than one rib of a blue whale on display, while only a tad number of museums worldwide own complete skeletons of the largest mammals on Earth.
