19th- Century Weapon Found In Whale

[Kor37 9]

19th-Century Weapon Found in Whale

By ERIN CONROY

AP

BOSTON (June 12) - A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt - more than a century ago. Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3 1/2-inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale's age, estimated between 115 and 130 years old.

 

"No other finding has been this precise," said John Bockstoce, an adjunct curator of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

 

Calculating a whale's age can be difficult, and is usually gauged by amino acids in the eye lenses. It's rare to find one that has lived more than a century, but experts say the oldest were close to 200 years old.

 

The bomb lance fragment, lodged in a bone between the whale's neck and shoulder blade, was likely manufactured in New Bedford, on the southeast coast of Massachusetts, a major whaling center at that time, Bockstoce said.

 

It was probably shot at the whale from a heavy shoulder gun around 1890. The small metal cylinder was filled with explosives fitted with a time-delay fuse so it would explode seconds after it was shot into the whale. The bomb lance was meant to kill the whale immediately and prevent it from escaping.

 

The device exploded and probably injured the whale, Bockstoce said.

 

"It probably hurt the whale, or annoyed him, but it hit him in a non-lethal place," he said. "He couldn't have been that bothered if he lived for another 100 years."

 

The whale harkens back to far different era. If 130 years old, it would have been born in 1877, the year Rutherford B. Hayes was sworn in as president, when federal Reconstruction troops withdrew from the South and when Thomas Edison unveiled his newest invention, the phonograph.

 

 

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"It's unusual to find old things like that in whales, and I knew immediately that it was quite old by its shape," said Craig George, a wildlife biologist for the North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management, who was called down to the site soon after it was found.

 

The revelation led George to return to a similar piece found in a whale hunted near St. Lawrence Island in 1980, which he sent to Bockstoce to compare.

 

"We didn't make anything of it at the time, and no one had any idea about their lifespan, or speculated that a bowhead could be that old," George said.

 

Bockstoce said he was impressed by notches carved into the head of the arrow used in the 19th century hunt, a traditional way for the Alaskan hunters to indicate ownership of the whale.

 

Whaling has always been a prominent source of food for Alaskans, and is monitored by the International Whaling Commission. A hunting quota for the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission was recently renewed, allowing 255 whales to be harvested by 10 Alaskan villages over five years.

 

After it is analyzed, the fragment will be displayed at the Inupiat Heritage Center in Barrow, Alaska

 

 

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New Bedford Whaling Museum / AP

The arrowhead on the left, which was removed from the neck of a bowhead whale captured off Alaska's coast last month, is believed to be from the late 19th century.

 

 

 

Cool Stuff. I didn't know whales lived that long!

[Wishfire 2]

That's amazing. And it reminds me of home. I grew up a few miles south of New Bedford. I've been to the Whaling Museum a number of times. Mostly school field trips. My favorite exhibit was the skeleton of a whale that had died a number of years back.

[Gummy 0]

If only Kirk, Spock and the crew were able to time warp back and bring them to the 23rd Century in an attempt to repopulate the species...

Oh, wait. They did that already.

[ARMS 0]

Whales have been suspected to live for centuries, this helps that theory.