Man accused of trying to take whale’s teeth

Federal agents are investigating reports that a college student tried to illegally hammer off the teeth of a rare sperm whale that washed ashore dead Sunday on a beach in Isla Vista near UC Santa Barbara.

“I arrived and this guy had a hammer and was hammering away on the teeth,” said Shane Anderson, supervisor of marine operations at the UC Santa Barbara Marine Laboratory. “I explained to him that there was a federal law against doing that and that the specimen was important for science. He didn’t want to hear it.”

Anderson told the student that if he didn’t stop, he was going to take his picture and report him. The student then became so verbally abusive that a Santa Barbara County sheriff’s deputy arrested him and cited him for public disturbance, Sheriff’s Sgt. Erik Raney said. David Harrison, 20, a UC Santa Barbara student, was released on the spot after being issued a misdemeanor citation, Raney said.

Harrison, who lives in Isla Vista, could not be immediately reached for comment.

Joseph Cordaro, who coordinates marine mammal strandings for the National Marine Fisheries Service, said it was extraordinarily rare for a sperm whale to wash ashore in California. The endangered whale typically remains far offshore, he said.

Unlike the large whales that have bristle-like baleen to strain plankton from seawater, sperm whales have large cone-shaped teeth which they use to hunt and eat squid at great depths.

Sperm whale teeth, which can be 8 inches in length and 3 inches in diameter, can sell for hundreds of dollars on the black market as raw teeth or carved or engraved into handiwork called scrimshaw. Federal officials often prosecute such trafficking cases to discourage poaching of the whales, which are listed as endangered species.

Sperm whales are protected by the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act. “It’s illegal to possess any part of any marine mammal without getting a permit from us,” Cordaro said. “What that person was trying to do was an illegal act.”

Roxanna Behtash, special agent with the National Marine Fisheries Service, confirmed that she has begun an investigation into the college student’s alleged violation of the Marine Mammal Protection Act. “It’s illegal for someone to go and yank the tooth out of a dead marine mammal,” Behtash said. “It’s illegal to possess or sell marine mammal parts of any kind, unless you have a permit.”

She declined to elaborate on the investigation until the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s general counsel office determines what specific charge should be pursued and whether it should be handled as a civil or criminal case.

Biologists, meanwhile, were planning a beach necropsy to take tissue and skin samples to learn what they could about the whale’s cause of death. A team from the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History was leading the effort as part of the national Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Response Program.

Typically, Cordaro said, the team will take a lower jaw and skin samples for DNA analysis. He said the whale appeared to be a young male, not quite fully developed at 29 feet in length. A mature male, he said, is usually about 32 feet long. Sperm whales can grow as large as 60 feet and can live to be 80 years old. Their population continues to recover from excessive whaling.

In this case, the teeth of the whale have been badly damaged, which could compromise the scientific value of removing the jaw, Anderson said. He said the student wasn’t very careful in trying to extract the teeth.

“This kid was busting them all up with a hammer,” Anderson said. “I guess he wanted them really bad.”

ken.weiss@latimes.com