Natalie Rouse opened a large freezer on Thursday stocked with bags of assorted whale parts.
“So here are pieces of blubber,” she said. “And then we’ve got a little bit of baleen in here. And then I have another big trash bag of baleen, and then another sample bag.”
Rouse is a necropsy biologist with Alaska Veterinary Services, and she’s part of a team trying to learn more about the young fin whale that washed up dead last weekend near downtown Anchorage. Since then, hundreds of residents have flocked to the frozen mudflats to catch a rare sight of the massive whale carcass. Meanwhile, Rouse has been at the Ecosystem Biomedical Health Laboratory at the University of Alaska Anchorage, going through more than 65 samples her team took from the animal.
“We got samples of feces, stomach contents, from two different areas of the GI tract,” Rouse said. “We took samples of baleen, we took samples of the tongue, we took samples of the heart.”
Rouse said she typically conducts necropsies in warmer months, and the winter is a slower time of year at the lab. She said the timing of this whale presents both challenges and advantages.
“It bursts the tissues at the cellular level, when they freeze, so that degraded some of those samples,” Rouse said. “However, the other samples are probably decomposing a lot less quickly than they would when it’s warm out.”
She said her team already learned quite a bit from the samples, including that the whale was female, and a juvenile.
“It was eating because it had a lot of feces, it had stomach contents,” Rouse said. “And we have some signs that maybe had some non-specific signs of disease, but that could be incidental.”
Rouse said they’ve sent off some of the samples to the Lower 48 for a better look at any diseases the whale had, as well as for cellular examination. While finding out what killed the whale is one question they’re trying to answer, Rouse said there’s a lot more to be learned.
“There are people that look for harmful algal bloom toxins, and they do surveillance for that on every marine mammal that we’re able to give them samples for,” Rouse said. “There’s someone studying dive physiology. There’s somebody that is doing aging with different tissues. So yeah, we’re going to learn a lot from this whale, even if we don’t figure out what the cause of death was.”
Rouse said the whale washed up with the tides on Saturday. Getting it back into the ocean will be a different story, since any heavy machinery that could move the whale likely won’t be able to make it out on the frozen mudflats. She said she anticipates the whale will wash out with high tides set to hit the area in mid-December.
“The most direct way to get it, get rid of it, would be to let it go out with the tide, and that allows for it to be returned to the ocean, where it provides a lot of food for all the other creatures in the ocean,” Rouse said.
As residents continue to make the pilgrimage to the whale, Rouse hopes that people will be respectful of the creature, and she offers a few safety tips.
“All wildlife can carry zoonotic diseases, and we don’t know why this whale died,” Rouse said. “So it’s important to take the same precautions you would take with any other, you know, dead animal on the side of the road. And so don’t, you know, don’t let your dogs eat it, and you don’t want to touch it and then touch your eyes, ears, mouth, nose, that kind of thing.”
Rouse also said that walking on icy, frozen mudflats comes with its own risks, so if you’re going to try to get a look at the whale, bring some cleats.
Wesley Early covers Anchorage life and city politics for Alaska Public Media. Reach him at wearly@alaskapublic.org and follow him on X at @wesley_early. Read more about Wesley here.
