On Tue, 12 Jun 2007 22:59:25 -0700, johac
<jhachmann@remove.sbcglobal.net> wrote:
- Refer: <jhachmann-5ABEA0.22592512062007@news.giganews.com>

Incredible!

(I didn't know whales could live that long.)

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19th-Century Weapon Found in Whale

Jun 12, 6:07 PM (ET)

By ERIN CONROY


BOSTON (AP) - 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 whale, which was nearly half a football field long, had a bomb lance
fragment lodged a bone between its neck and shoulder blade. The fragment
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.

The 49-foot male whale died when it was shot with a similar projectile
last month, and the older device was found buried beneath its blubber as
hunters carved it with a chain saw for harvesting.

"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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http://apnews.myway.com/article/20070612/D8PNHJ1G0.html

Paging "Jonah"
Will Jonah come to reception, please.

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