The Measure of a Leviathan

Armed with a sharpening stone and a 15-inch knife, marine biologist Tom Lewis and his crew labored long and hard in Huntington Beach on Thursday beheading the carcass of a beached, 39-foot gray whale for study.

“There’s no way that we can determine the exact cause of death. But today we took 30 different kinds of measurements of the whale that will be valuable for study later,” said Lewis, a biologist with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, where the head was taken.

Cyclists, joggers and others who were curious stopped to see the leviathan up close, but not too close. The smart gawkers stayed upwind.

Five-year-old Richard Dean of Bellflower, turned to his father and declared, “I think the whale is 6,000 and maybe 4 feet long. He’s real big.”

Lewis and his crew of two, John E. Heyning, assistant curator of mammals for the museum, and Dave Janiger, a mammalist, toiled about 2 1/2 hours before they successfully severed the whale head. Janiger helped Lewis by cutting through the 10-inch-thick whale blubber with a flensing iron, a thick, 18-inch blade on a 5-foot wooden handle that is traditionally used by whalers.

To avoid cutting through the whale’s tough skeleton, the biologists followed the jaw line and severed the head just behind the first vertebra. To lift the huge head, they wrapped a cable around portions of the jaw and hooked it to a winch on a 4-wheel-drive, flat-bed truck. The head, about 10 feet tall and 12 feet long, was trucked to Los Angeles.

“We maintain a very large collection of whales and dolphins, and we’re going to take the skull of this whale today and add it to the collection for future study,” Lewis said.

The rest of the whale was buried in a 15-foot-deep pit dug by a tractor where it lay, about 2 1/2 miles north of Huntington Beach Pier. Judging from the length, which Lewis said was 11.8 meters, the whale weighed about 22 tons.

The carcass of the young, adult male whale was found floating in Los Angeles Harbor two days ago and towed out to sea. But it was spotted again in Huntington Beach between Bolsa Chica State Beach and the bluffs by lifeguard supervisor Michael Beuerlein about 3 p.m. Wednesday.

“It was dead at that time and you could see lots of pelicans, sea gulls and other marine birds flying all around the spot,” Beuerlein said.

Lifeguards notified city crews, which dragged the whale out of the surf early Thursday to avoid any health hazards from the rotting carcass.

Facts about the gray or baleen whale, as it is also known, are few since it is difficult to fully observe them at sea. Lewis said the gray whales, such as the one discovered in Huntington Beach, belong to the group of whales that mate in the warm Baja California waters in Mexico’s Scammon’s Lagoon and migrate north to chilly Alaskan waters.

By studying stranded mammals, biologists often can determine maximum life expectancy for the species, levels of pollutants in the animal and the age at which males and females become sexually mature.

The whale found Thursday was the largest beached in Orange County in recent years. Last year, a 22-foot-long gray whale, a female about 1 year old, washed up on the sand near the Balboa Pier in Newport Beach. It had become tangled in a gill net at sea and died.

In 1987, storm-driven waves washed the carcass of a 25-foot gray whale onto the shore about 200 yards north of the Huntington Beach pier--right in front of surfside condominiums. That whale was described as a female yearling that apparently starved to death.

Lewis said the natural history museum has collected stranded cetaceans since 1960, and its research collection of marine mammals is second in size in the United States only to that at the Smithsonian Institution.

Stranded marine mammals come under the jurisdiction of the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 and can only be handled by authorized persons, Lewis said.

He emphasized that anyone who finds a dead whale, dolphin or porpoise on beaches in Orange and Los Angeles counties, should contact the natural history museum’s hot line at (213) 585-5105.

For dead seals or sea lions, the public should contact a local animal control agency.