After a dead fin whale washed up on a beach in Newquay, Cornwall, this week, experts are now dealing with a logistical challenge: how do you get rid of a carcass weighing several tonnes? And what do you do if it explodes?
Hundreds of whales become stranded along the British coastline each year, and the numbers are rising. Since the Zoological Society of London’s Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme (CSIP) was founded in 1990, it has recorded 17,850 cetacean strandings in the UK. There has been an unusually high number of whale strandings so far this year, including that of a pod of 55 pilot whales that washed up on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland in July in one of the UK’s biggest mass strandings to date.
“When I started this job 25 years ago, you might be looking at 500 to 600 strandings a year, but now we are looking at 1,000,” said the CSIP project manager Rob Deaville, one of the experts who conducted postmortem examinations on July’s mass stranding.
The discovery of a stranded whale poses an array of problems for the local councils and organisations tasked with disposing of the carcass.
“Once on the shore a whale quickly decomposes and so can be a public health risk,” said Danny Groves, of the cetacean charity WDC. “There are significant hazards from bacteria and so people and pets should stay away. Often the beach site is disinfected after the removal operation.”
The financial and practical difficulties of moving a dead whale, which can weigh between 1 to 40 tonnes, are heightened by the potential for the decomposing carcass to become explosive.
“They can, in some cases, explode if left. as gases build up inside their bodies,” said Groves.
Last year a video posted on Youtube documented the grisly – and sudden – release of methane gas from a whale carcass that had been decomposing off the coast of Tomales Bay, California. Another video captured the loud sounds heard from two sperm whale explosions on the beach of Ameland island in the Netherlands in 1997.
The bloating stage of a cetacean’s decomposition is one of the main concerns when whales become stranded on the beaches of populated locations, and organisations have to work against the clock to avoid harm to members of the public.
In July a 50-tonne fin whale washed up on the coast of Kerry in Ireland, where its awkward location forced local authorities to leave the carcass to decompose on site, despite the concerning buildup of gases.
Organisations around the world have used various methods to deal with the giant carcasses before they become an injury risk, with varying degrees of success.
Archive footage from 1970 shows the radical effort made by engineers in the US to use C-4 plastic explosives strapped to the whale carcass in an attempt to “disintegrate” it in a controlled manner, with the intention that birds and other scavengers would feed on the remains.
The footage highlights why the use of explosives to dispose of whale carcasses is discouraged by local councils, as the detonation resulted in overwhelming smells of rotten whale filling the local area, and large chunks of whale flesh being launched into the air and damaging vehicles parked 400 metres away.
More recent examples of explosive use on whale carcasses have yielded similar results. In 2005 the Icelandic coastguard tried to remove a whale carcass from Hafnarfjörður harbour by splitting it in two with explosives and manually pulling both halves out to sea. This backfired when both halves immediately drifted back on to shore.
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The potential for a bloated carcass to rupture and spread chunks of decomposing flesh across the beach became a worry for officials in May 2023, when they cordoned off the area around a 30 tonne whale that had become beached on the East Yorkshire coast. While the carcass became something of a morbid tourist attraction, it also posed a safety risk and was removed intact by officials.
Taking carcasses to landfill is generally seen as the optimal disposal method, with around a third of all beached whales being disposed of in this manner in the US.
Serious dilemmas occur when whales become stranded on private land, due to the financial challenges faced by the landowners when removing the remains.
“On our patch, one of the biggest and most expensive that I am aware of might have been a fin whale in Cornwall that may have cost £20,000-£30,000 to remove because it became a really complicated recovery, involving the use of police and low loaders to escort it through narrow streets to a rendering plant” said Deaville.
Rendering, which is increasingly being used in the UK, involves separating cetacean remains into pieces, boiling them down and combining them with alcohol to create biodiesel.
Incineration has also been used to safely dispose of remains, but it can be difficult to conduct on a large carcass.
“It’s less used now to be honest, but it’s still an option,” said Deaville. “When lots of animals in the country die they have to be removed, and quite often they go to be cremated. But the problem is if you have a large whale, the box and incinerator might be small, which means you have to take that whale apart into pieces to use it.”