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It’s like real-world CSI, but for sea life.
Warning: This report contains images of the dissection of an animal
Lying dead on a cold steel slab at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) is a harbour porpoise, the UK’s smallest – but arguably cutest – marine mammal.
It’s about to be dissected to establish how it died.
If there are crimes investigated in this lab, they’re the kind we’re all complicit in.
Dolphins drowned in fishermen’s nets; whales deranged by military sonar and driven ashore; porpoises killed by the blunt-force trauma of a speedboat’s prow; a few however die due to the most insidious and increasingly abundant scourge at sea: plastic.
ZSL biologist Rob Deaville holds up a few metres of tangled rope and fishing line that he removed from the tail of a minke whale that washed up dead in East Yorkshire in 2020.
The mess of nylon and polyester, encrusted in goose barnacles, had cut almost halfway through the whale’s flukes (the lobes that form a tail), rendering them useless. Unable to dive and therefore feed, the whale starved.
“A four-kilogram mass of rope effectively killed a 10-tonne whale,” says Mr Deaville.
“It’s a really horrendous way for that animal to go.”
The minke whale washed up dead on a British beach in 2020
The Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme (CSIP), which Mr Deaville leads, has been running for 30 years.
It has recorded more than 20,000 strandings of whales, dolphins, seals and sharks. The 4,500 necropsies they have performed give biologists a rare opportunity to learn more about these elusive animal’s lives.
Biologists can also learn more about the threats the animals face, whether it’s shifting predators and prey linked to climate change, disease outbreaks, chemical…
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