Friday, Jan 18, 2008
Muscat: The task of removing the carcass of a fully-grown male sperm whale, which washed up dead on a beach in Muscat on Wednesday, was made even more Herculean by the large number of curious onlookers. It took until late afternoon on Thursday to move the animal.
The 15.9 metre long mammal became the talk of the town as people made a beeline to the small fishing hamlet is tucked away in a corner of Darseit district in the capital. "The huge crowd gathered at the beach made our task of removing the remains of the whale from the beach very difficult," said Badr Al Balushi, a senior official of the Ministry of Environment and Climate Affairs, told Gulf News on Thursday.
He revealed that the whale was brought out of the water and on to the beach for the final removal. "We had to use heavy-duty equipment to move the carcass and now we intend to cut it into pieces and taken away for final burial," he said, adding the disposal will be done by Muscat Municipality.
Decomposed
The dead whale was highly decomposed and by yesterday morning the entire area was filled with a foul smell from the carcass.
"The whale was probably dead for one or two weeks and the body was decomposed," said Dr Simon Wilson, consultant marine biologist with Five Oceans Company and a member of the Environment Society of Oman's Whales and Dolphin Research Group.
He revealed that they had taken tissue samples from the carcass for DNA analysis. "We cannot determine the cause of the death from the DNA analysis but could speculate that it could have been hit by a vessel in deep sea," he added. He said that the deep wounds visible on the dead whale could have been from sharks feeding on the dead body or from the body being hit by a ship after it was dead. "We can only speculate on that matter," he said.
Dr Wilson agreed that it was possible to extract ambergris from the dead whale but the manner in which the body was decomposed it was a difficult task. Ambergris is an excretion from the sperm whale and a valuable commodity, in part due to its rarity and the uncertainty of supply.
"It has a very high market value as it is used for making perfume," he said. Ambergris has been prized for centuries for its peculiar qualities. It has been used in the perfume industry as a fixative for fine perfumes, for medicinal purposes and as an aphrodisiac.
The dead whale, which was male, may prove a fascinating research subject for the marine environment scientists here, but the excited public not only gave experts a headache but kept policemen on their toes by causing a traffic jam on the narrow street leading up to the beach.
Largest-brained animal
The sperm whale is a toothed whale that lives in pods. It has a huge brain that weighs about 20 pounds (9 kg), the largest brain of any animal.
Sperm whales produce ambergris, a dark, waxy substance (related to cholesterol) that is produced in the lower intestines and is used by the perfume industry.
Sperm whales are carnivores that mostly eat giant squid.
The whale was named after the milky-white waxy substance, spermaceti, found in its head and originally mistaken for sperm.
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