The killing continues -

[Guest guest]

http://news./s/ap/20070612/ap_on_re_us/century_old_whale

 

19th-century weapon found in whale By ERIN CONROY, Associated Press

Writer

Tue Jun 12, 6:24 PM ET

 

 

 

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 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.

 

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.

 

(This version REMOVES incorrect comparison to football field.)