Laurie Schreiber photo
Seen here is an example of a beaked whale that Dan DenDanto cleaned and rearticulated at his Mount Desert Island shop in 2010.
May 20, 2019
Mount Desert expert collects humpback whale's skeleton for future display in Maine State Museum
Courtesy / Lindsey Jones
Dan DenDanto, Mount Desert Island scientist and expert in the field of cleaning, articulating and restoring whale skeletons for display, is seen here on an excavator, preparing the bones of a recently deceased humpback for further cleaning using a year-long composting technique.
Dan DenDanto, a Mount Desert Island scientist and expert in the specialized field of cleaning, articulating and restoring whale skeletons for display, traveled to Cape Cod to collect the bones of a 40-ton humpback whale that died earlier this month.
After a cleaning process that takes more than a year, the rearticulated skeleton will likely become part of a mother-and-calf display at the Maine State Museum, DenDanto told Mainebiz.
DenDanto is a research associate at Allied Whale, a program of College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, and director of its North Atlantic Fin Whale Catalogue. In more than two decades at his home-based shop, called Whales and Nails, he has completed 18 professional installations of whale skeletons in institutions around the country.
The humpback found off Cape Cod is listed in Allied Whale’s North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catalogue. Whales can be individually identified by markings on their tails. This one was named Vector and was first listed in the catalog in 1984 as an adult. Since that time, she’s known to have mothered five calves. At the time of her death, she measured 45 feet 7 inches. The specimen was in moderate decomposition, which indicated she had died a couple of days before she was sighted, DenDanto said.
Mother-calf display
The whale was sighted by a whalewatch boat during normal tour activities and was soon after towed to shore. A necropsy took place May 8. The cause of death has not yet been determined.
The primary responder to the incident was International Fund for Animal Welfare, on Cape Cod. Like Allied Whale, the fund is one of a network of organizations authorized by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Authority to respond to live and dead marine mammal strandings. The response was led by the fund’s marine mammal expert, Misty Niemeyer.
DenDanto said he was interested in collecting a large female humpback skeleton to go along with an 18-foot humpback calf skeleton collected off Cranberry Isles in 2012, in order to create a mother-calf display.
He led a team of students and associates from Allied Whale to assist with the necropsy, which took place on the shore of Sandwich, Mass.
Once the animal was dismantled and its soft tissue disposed of in a local landfill, DenDanto and his team loaded the skeletal remains into lined containers on three trailers for transfer to his facility.
“Suitably packing up a whale this size for transportation back to Maine is not a trivial task,” he said.
Burying the bones
The primary cleaning technique he uses involves burying the bones for a year in compost, where microorganisms eat the remaining flesh. After a year, he will dig up the bones and perform further cleaning techniques, then assemble the skeleton for its eventual display.
For now, the humpback calf is in College of the Atlantic’s research collection, he said.
Vector didn’t show evidence of a ship strike or fishing gear entanglement at the time of the necropsy, DenDanto said.
Whales and Nails has been in consultation with Maine State Museum for over a year, regarding a whale skeleton display in a renovated museum space, he said.
Since January 2016, there has been an increase in deaths of humpback whales along the Atlantic coast, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service. The situation is called an “unusual mortality event.” A portion of the dead humpbacks whales have shown evidence of having been struck by a vessel prior to their death.
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