Watch out! Blue whale dead for 26 years is still reeking oil
Blue Whale skeleton
A blue whale skeleton has been dripping oil for 26 years. Sitting in the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts, the blue whale is a KOBO, King of the Blue Ocean, and suffered a brutal death in 1998.
Its body was discovered on the bow of a tanker in Rhode Island. It was first hit by the propeller of another tanker in Nova Scotia, after which the ship it was found on picked it up and carried it into Narragansett Bay.
Researchers removed the KOBO's flesh and cleaned its bones by submerging them in New Bedford harbour for five months. The bones were then reassembled. However, despite all that cleaning, they could not get all the oil to drain out which is still dripping.
"They did a pretty good job of getting the bones clean. They didn't get all the oil out though," Bob Rocha, New Bedford Whaling Museum’s associate curator of science and research, told WBZ-TV.
These sea beasts are extremely oily creatures, so much so that they were hunted to take it off them and use it in soaps, lubricants, and even edible things like margarine.
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Whale oil was also once used in explosives.
Museum collects the oil
It is filled in a whale's bone marrow and helps it to maintain buoyancy. Rocha told Popular Science that the abundance of oil in a whale also acts as a reserve energy source for the marine creatures.
All that oil still remains intact in this blue whale which is still leaking oil 26 years on. Despite best efforts to remove it all, the 66-foot skeleton still has a lot of it.
Rocha says it adds to a visitor's experience of visiting the museum.
"I like the fact that that skeleton is oily because it adds to a person's experience coming in, being able to smell the oil, get a sense of what it might have been like to be stuck on a whale ship for three years," Rocha told WBZ-TV.
But don't worry, it won't drench you. The museum has put up a system that catches the oil, sending it into a flask.
