Blue whale skeleton at New Bedford museum still oozing oil | Hacker News Reader

Blue whale skeleton at New Bedford museum still oozing oil

wpri.com

202 pointsgeox78 comments

NBWM is absolutely fantastic. They have Clifford Ashley's (wrote Ashley Book of Knots) rope and knot collection, and some of his paintings too (he lived on the other side of the harbour). They also have the world's largest scrimshaw collection, and the Lagoda, the world's largest model wooden ship (1:2 scale IIRC), which you can walk around on and check out the ropework. Seamen's Bethel from Moby Dick is literally a block away. Easily the coolest museum I've been to.

Interesting bit of trivia, New Bedford used to be the richest city in the planet because of the whaling industry.

The typical claim made is "it was the wealthiest city per capita in North America in the first half of the 19th century" but on p23 https://npshistory.com/publications/nebe/clr.pdf claims it was the second in the state. New Orleans is claimed to be the nation's wealthiest in 1830s-1840s.

The old housing stock certainly supports the notion that it was very wealthy at one point. NB reminds me of Troy, NY - another small but very wealthy city that fell on hard times when its main industries left. The presence of RPI seems to be helping Troy experience a bit of a renaissance. Hopefully, the new MBTA commuter rail connection will be a shot in the arm for New Bedford.

While places like Lawrence, Springfield and New Bedford peaked when their local industries were booming money printers none of the outer Massachusetts cities really fell on the chronic "hard times" they're generally subject to now until the 1970s/1980s when shifting economic and regulatory circumstances finally killed the last of the industrial/manufacturing economic activity that had been sustaining them.

Lowell is a great analogy to Troy since it has UMass Lowell to pump it full of money and it's arguably the least crappy of the "not Boston" cities in MA.

You have to see those whales skeletons in person to understand their sheer size. And if you want to know more than you need to about whales, pick up a copy of Moby Dick. Don't be intimidated by the size. I still can't believe this book was written in the 1800s. Catching a whale was akin to striking oil.

> Catching a whale was akin to striking oil.

Quite literally, apparently.

> to understand their sheer size

In the linked article, towards the middle, the photo shows 2 people reading the plaque next to a pink structure, which appears to be that of a whale's heart. That, combined with the skeleton hanging over them, should give us an idea that we are no bigger to these whales, than probably an average snail is to us (between 5 cm and 9 cm).

The average snail is 2-5 cm, not 5-9 cm. Just sayin.

Perhaps they meant slugs. In German at least, both are called Schnecken (just one is naked), so perhaps that persists in other languages as well.

I think it's more likely different species in different places. I, in NZ, don't think I've ever seen a slug as much as 5cm long, let alone 9cm.

Look up banana slug. Common where I live.

I'm guessing much, much smaller than that, taking microsnails into account.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/found-the-worlds-tinie...

But let me just add up their lengths, along with the lengths of all giant african land snails and all other snails, and divide by the total number of snails in the world ... is there a statistical trick that could answer this, like the one for counting undiscovered species? Probably not.

Also, In The Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick. It is a non-fiction account of the wreck of the Essex, a Nantucket whaler, that was inexplicably "stove by a whale", and lost at sea - an unheard of occurrence at the time. The crew was forced to survive in open boats for weeks, and resorted to cannibalism.

This was the story that inspired Melville to write Moby Dick.

The book is both a survival story and an investigation of the Nantucket whaling industry and whaling in general, as well as the social and economic background.

Thanks, sounds amazing! I've checked it out from local library.

The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky (book/audiobook) is excellent on this topic. The Basque, according to current evidence, invented whaling, and were culturally central to its interweaving with human history. The book tells the tale with rigour and flare.

Commercial whaling, I guess. Whaling began thousands of years earlier elsewhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling

Thank you,I stand corrected, should have said "industrialised whaling".

The whaling industry as depicted in Moby Dick is pretty high on my list of the most unbelievable things that really happened. Particularly the range of the boats and the method of catching the whales. Up there with the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs and how the East India company managed to dominate the entire country in terms of sheer implausibility.

I would say the Ice trade was crazier.

And if your rulers are bloodthirsty heart burners and skin flayers, even satan will be received warmly. I mean Huitzilopochtli is giving Kali run for her money in the deities I don't to live under competition.

And east india - you replace the elite and the people underneath will continue following orders - the same happened with the Manchu conquering of china.

Strapping the whale to the side of the ship to be butchered while sharks feasted on the underside always seemed insane to me.

What other options existed?

Here's the life-size blue whale sculpture outside the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo.

Note the size of the people.

https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/10/e1/e9/42/...

and yet, it was a mere road kill to a tanker

This makes me strike upon an idea seeing as petroleum is leaking from the whale - might whales be used as a renewable oil resource in the same way as renewable lumber? Whale farms and such (not referring to online dating here, but literally a whale farm). The oil of whale might be used for many things such as lighting of lamp or lubrication of machine.

Whale oil used to be used for the things you mentioned, but you run into a lot of sustainability issues on top the ethical issues. (I mean FFS if the probe did what it did in star trek 4, imagine what they would have sent instead for your scenario.)

Practically speaking, you can't easily just let the whales go out into the open due to the risk of someone else hunting them down vs cost of captivity or having them be 'monitored' in the wild.

Ok I'm going to come out and say it because I think multiple people in this thread have hinted at the same confusion: What bloody kind of oil are we talking about here? Whale oil, that somehow was captured in the bones? Petroleum oil from the whale's encounter with the tanker? They basically buried the lede on this story and nowhere appear to explain why this particular whale is dripping some kind of "oil" that seemingly other museum example don't experience. So - anyone got any insight here?

It sounds like it’s whale oil because:

- it’s coming from the bone marrow

- it has a reddish tint

- the curator says the smell is reminiscent of a whaling ship and not, say, a machine shop or oil rig.

I think you are probably right, but then the natural question becomes - why? As in, is there something unique to this specimen and it's display? If I drive over to the aquarium in my state and examine the whale display, would it also drip?

Probably not -- very few whale skeletons on display are from recently deceased whales. Just a random lookup -- the one in the London Natural History Museum is from 1891. Seems likely that when it was new it also leaked some oil?

Machine shops actually used whale oil until quite late. Much better than equivalent petroleum products until the '50s or later.

If it burns, it burns. I'd guess that's the prehistory of it. The scientific method was barely much older than whale oil usage as far as I can tell.

It's a mixture of fats. Think olive oil, fish oil, the oils your skin excretes.

That could be - but my point is the article doesn't make it clear what kind of oil we're talking about, and as you note - the oil would come from the fats, so why is it excreting from the bones? IE: wouldn't all the potential oil have been removed when they prepared this specimen for display?

My bet is that largest bones here are just too big and find some recipient where to cook them was impossible.

But both whale fat and petrol oil are possible here. Maybe the whale died by a black tide and was floating some time before to be scooped by the ship. Fin whales type are fast cetaceans and crashing with a ship is not so usual like in other cetaceans. Not unless is an ill animal.

> my point is the article doesn't make it clear what kind of oil we're talking about,

The article clearly explains that it is oil form the bone marrow of the animal. Quoting the relevant part:

"Rocha explained that KOBO’s bone marrow is actually 'full of oil,' even though the whale has been dead for more than two decades.

'It’s seeping out through the pores of the bones,' Rocha said. 'The outer edges of the bone are a little more porous than human bones and [gravity is] just pulling the oil out.'"

Bone marrow contains fat cells.

[1] "Typically, when a fresh whale specimen is collected, preparators will attempt to remove as much of this oil as possible. But even then, they cannot get all of it out of the bones."

[2] “The marrow is oily and the oil is a source of energy for these animals. Especially the baleen whales, who typically have a period of the year where they don’t feed,” Robert Rocha, the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s Associate Curator of Science and Research, tells Popular Science. “There’s energy stored in the muscles and in the blubber, but the energy stored in the oil and the bones is a reserve energy source for them.”

[3] "Their bones contain a lot of oil. In life this substance is critical for the animals to maintain buoyancy in water and was the reason why so many were slaughtered during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But it can cause major issues when trying to preserve their remains in collections."

[1] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/whale-oil-and-half-an-inch-of...

[2] https://www.popsci.com/science/blue-whale-leaking-oil/

[3] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/whale-oil-and-half-an-inch-of...

Nice work - this is the kind of background and insight I would have expected from the journalist.

Yeah, you paid for it after all

It's rather obvious that it's whale oil, given that whales used to be hunted for their oil. I don't know how you could even assume that a whale skeleton would drip petroleum.

Funny anecdote: The automatic transmission used to be lubricated with whale oil because it (whale oil) could handle higher temperatures than petroleum based lubricants. It was banning whaling in the 20th century that lead to developing petroleum-based high-heat lubricants.

I think the transmission stuff was sperm oil, wax from head of a sperm whale. Which probably accounts for some of the confusion here. There were several different products derived from whales, if you're not aware of that you wouldn't expect to find sperm whale dome grease in a blue whale's bones.

The nomenclature isn't that clear, and none of us have first hand experience with any of them anymore so all of our knowledge about this is from third hand reddit TILs and moby dick.

Yes, very familiar with vintage ATF and it has a distinctive smell different from later formulations, likely due to the use of whale oil (whaleoleum?) instead of petroleum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEXRON#1973_–_DEXRON-II(C)

> I don't know how you could even assume that a whale skeleton would drip petroleum.

Rather than being an ass, perhaps you could read my comment and note that I quote the article in which it appears to reference a goddamn oil tanker as the cause of death. We fucking know whales were hunted for their oil, now are you ready to join the adults in the conversation or are you going to continue to be a know-it-all prick?

From the article:

> Rocha explained that KOBO’s bone marrow is actually “full of oil,” even though the whale has been dead for more than two decades.

> “It’s seeping out through the pores of the bones,” Rocha said. “The outer edges of the bone are a little more porous than human bones and [gravity is] just pulling the oil out.”

One of the best museums in MA. My kids love this place - there's a model whale heart to climb through, a scale replica whaling vessel fully rigged, real samples of whale oil to smell, plenty of harpoons, and a lot of art from the era.

New Bedford is really one of the hidden gems of this state - I'm really glad South Coast Rail will be connecting it back to Boston after decades of being ignored. Worth a visit.

A great many of the paintings in their art collection are by Clifford Ashley of ABOK fame. Besides being a knot collector, he was an accomplished artist.

So in Göteborg, Sweden, there's an actual embalmed blue whale from the 1800s. I visited there as a kid in the 1980s. Had no idea it was unique, but apparently it's the only embalmed blue whale in the world. Wild.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/malm-whale

(Got the "only one" bit by googling further for a long time.)

I recall hearing how the demand for whale oil fell off a cliff not long after electricity was scaled for lighting.

Interesting in that now we're looking to move away from hydrocarbons which ultimately was how much of the electricity has been produced.

Crude oil saved the whales from extinction.

Kerosene, refined from crude oil, was at least as good as whale oil for lamps. It was also cheaper, so that was the end of the whaling industry. There were pathetic advertisements from the whale oil people of that time arguing for 'pure' whale oil over 'impure' substitutes. However kerosene was so obviously a better deal consumers switched with lightning speed anyway.

As an aside, gasoline was a waste product of the crude oil refining process that produced kerosene. That meant very cheap fuel for the internal combustion engine which was starting its climb up the technology s-curve at the same time.

- "There were pathetic advertisements from the whale oil people of that time arguing for 'pure' whale oil over 'impure' substitutes."

It's the same today: people pay premiums for vegetables fertilized with "pure" bird poop (guano) over equivalent phosphate rocks mined from the earth.

e.g.

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/world/americas/30peru.htm...

Nonetheless whale oil remained very useful as a low temperature machine lubricating oil, and its use for that purpose increased so much that by the 1960s sperm whale catches were at their all-time highest, before abruptly falling with the rise of the environmental movement.

It wasn’t quite immediate - margarine was invented to fill the gap on the demand side, and kept the industry going for quite a few decades.

What killed off whaling was that they killed off the whales - it simply wasn’t economically viable to send ships out any more.

I thought whale oil was what you get when you boil the fatty tissue of the whale. Why would the skeleton have any oil in it?

I'm sorry whoever I offended enough to downvote this. I didn't realize whale skeletons were a touchy subject. I'm not an American so I don't know.

I’m confident that for every grumpy down voter that thinks they’re on Reddit, there a few others that will upvote an honest question that is getting downvoted to counteract. So Ms. Grumpy Redditor had the opposite of the desired effect.

Get the leg bone of a calf (preferably split) medium oven for 20mins.

Some nice toast, chopped capers and parsley to help you clean up the oil. You’re welcome.

Chemist pet peeve:

“The oil catcher consists of a series of tubes that start at the tip of KOBO’s rostrum and funnel down into a beaker.”

That’s an Erlenmeyer flask, not a beaker. The quote gets it right in the next sentence. Just sayin’ :)

A prime example of thee "Gell-Mann Amnesia" effect:

https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

No it is not. It is merely an inaccuracy pointed out by an expert. For it to be an example of the "Gell-Mann Amnesia" effect sseagull would have to show some sign that they forgot that the wpri can make mistakes when they are reading something not within their expertise. That would be the "amnesia" part.

Plus, is it even an inaccuracy? In common parlance beaker and flask are synonyms.[1] Simply regular people talking to regular people describing some glassware are not as accurate as a chemist talking to a chemist.

1: as evidenced that thesarus.com identifying `beaker` as the strongest synonym match for `flask` https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/flask

Technical terminology is frequently different from common use.

That’s not even a “well, technically…”. My chemistry education stopped at high school 40 years ago, and even I remember the difference. It’s like confusing a bicycle with a car.

And note that the person quoted uses the term “flask” exclusively. The word “beaker” only shows up parenthetically, because the reporter spent their time in chemistry class asking, “when am I ever going to need to know this?”

If we woke up one day to discover that the skeleton was mercilessly destroyed, I think we already have our suspect :p

All jokes aside, this got me curious to look for the definition of "oil", a word used to describe stuff extracted from plants, rocks and, apparently, animals too.

It turns out that for a liquid to be classified as oil, according to Merriam Webster, it needs to be "flammable", "not dissolve in water" and "greasy".

What's greasy, you ask? Well, it's smeared in... "oily matter".

"Oil" used to mean olive oil and nothing else.

Its usage gradually expanded to include other vegetable fats, liquid animal fats such as whale oil, and finally mineral oil when it was discovered.

People back then weren't particularly interested in the chemical compositions of the different oils, only that they felt similar and served similar purposes.

Meanwhile, animal fats that are solid at room temperature, such as butter and lard, were never really called "oil" despite being much closer to other edible fats than anything we dug up from a desert.

Highly recommend the museum in New Bedford !

There is a blue whale skeleton in my hometown, at the Melbourne Museum. https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/articles/14968

24yrs if anyone is too lazy to read

Many years ago I attended a wedding reception in the exact hall pictured in the article. It was a great party.

I was at a wedding dinner held under this a decade ago, and it they warned us it might drip on the meal.

also was at a wedding there and people daring others to smell the oil jar. apparently the smell is absolutely rancid

I wonder how many gallons we saved from being released into the ocean?

That oil is food for worms that feed exclusively on whale bones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osedax

Great article.

Awful website.

Oh is this what people mean by big oil?

Nice! A real life demonstration of the creation of fossil fuels.

No. In nature this oil would be degraded very quickly (eaten or oxidized). Read this for a basic primer on the formation of petroleum sources:

https://www.norskpetroleum.no/en/petroleum-resources/petrole...

Not sure how this particular whale met its demise, but I'm guessing it probably should have been taking a statin.

"The whale was discovered wrapped around the bow of a tanker that had accidentally killed him back in 1998. KOBO’s carcass was eventually towed to shore and dissected for research and educational purposes."

Having repeatedly almost killed myself from slipping on a small drop of oil on my kitchen floor in socks, this makes me feel like a nervous grandmother.

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