Ingredients:
7,000 L tap water
60 Balaenoptera musculus bones
100 L lipase solution
300 L bacillus spore mixture
40 L biochem accelerator

In a large container, combine water, bones, and lipase. Heat to 50°C with continuous mixing for one week, or until oil floating to the top becomes less evident. Cool the mixture to 37°C, and add bacillus and accelerator. Stew at 37°C for several months.

One might assume the above to be a peculiar soup recipe, and for an extremely large party at that. But it is actually a formula for a most unusual science experiment happening in a warehouse on the pier in Victoria, British Columbia. Balaenoptera musculus is the Latin name for the blue whale, the largest animal ever to have existed on the planet. One specimen’s bones can be found in the warehouse — an array of massive vertebrae, mandibles, ribs, and flipper bones carefully arranged on the floor, with hundreds of smaller fragments placed on crowded racks nearby. There is also an unpleasant smell in the air.

The experiment is an attempt to degrease these giant bones, so that an entire blue whale skeleton can be reassembled without fear of it becoming rancid and discoloured over time. This, apparently, is not easy to do. Marine mammal physiology is such that whale skeletons are saturated with oil, making them buoyant and useful as an energy storage unit, but also prone to decomposition. It also doesn’t help that some of these oily bones are almost as heavy as a small car.

I’m lucky. On the day I visit, the soup is not brewing, and I’m told that the smell is much more tolerable now. I’m also here on a day when there are twenty or so six-year-olds, a school field trip, who have come to gaze upon a rib cage that happens to be large enough to house their entire class, their teacher, and maybe a few of the cars that brought them here as well. Today these children will learn that there is such a thing as a “master skeleton articulator.”

Mike deRoos quietly chuckles at this job title. “Master?” he muses. “I guess you might call me that, especially when there are so few people in the world who actually do this, but really there’s no official title for this type of work.” DeRoos and his wife, Michiru, are the individuals primarily responsible for getting this skeleton ready and assembled, hopefully by early 2010, so that it can be displayed at the University of British Columbia’s Beaty Biodiversity Museum, a new facility designed to showcase this icon of biodiversity as well as more than two million other specimens the university has collected over the years.

How a whale goes from living, breathing organism to marquee museum exhibit turns out to be an exercise in twists and turns. Washed up dead but intact near Tignish, Prince Edward Island, in 1987, the eighty-five-foot blue whale became the talk of the town. (After all, it’s not every day that one can see a real-life leviathan, let alone stand on one.) Wildlife pathologist Pierre-Yves Daoust was summoned to examine the huge carcass, a daunting experience: not only was he just a month into his new professorship at the University of PEI’s Atlantic Veterinary College, but he was also fresh from the prairies, a habitat not particularly known for large aquatic animals. When I ask him about his first impressions of the whale, he says it was a rather “big awakening” to the nuances of island work, but is quick to add that he has “never been intimidated by large animals.” With the help of many local volunteers, Daoust performed the necropsy, and the PEI Department of Fisheries arranged for the burial. And then the whale was forgotten, more or less, save for the stories and a hastily drawn map depicting the burial site.

It wasn’t until twenty years later that Andrew Trites, director of UBC’s marine mammal research unit, found himself uttering the phrase “Bet I could find a blue whale skeleton.” This was actually just a casual suggestion for an architectural addition to the new museum, but he was pleased when his colleagues saw educational merit in such an acquisition. He eventually learned of the Tignish whale while joking with a curator at the Canadian Museum of Nature. “You don’t by chance have an extra blue whale around? ” To which he received the reply, “As a matter of fact… ”