Want to Fall in Love? Meet Ms. Blue.
Updated: May 12, 2022
In November 2017 I boarded a flight to Seattle to visit a good friend I hadn't seen in a while. The idea was that we would drive up from Seattle to Friday Harbor to attend a film festival.
Plan: We would eat and sleep and watch movies for a couple of days. We had been wanting to do this for a while and we were both excited.
As I boarded the plane to fly out to Seattle and searched for a place to sit - now that I think about it, it must have been Southwest for there were no assigned seating - I thought (and I remember this clearly) - why was it that I never sat next to anyone interesting on a flight?
Well.
Someone up there was paying attention to me that day.
Moments later, I found a seat next to a woman my age. I removed my jacket and my scarf and tucked them away. Then took out a book and opened it to the page I had been on.
Halfway through the flight, the woman sitting to my left said -
"Are you enjoying the book you're reading?"
I looked up.
"Yes!" I said. "I'm loving it."
"Well," she said, smiling. "My advisor's husband wrote it."
Turns out she worked in the Marine Mammal Physiology Project at UC Santa Cruz and she worked with dolphins! It was one of the most fascinating flights I have ever had. I couldn't stop asking her questions. We had an animated conversation for the rest of the trip and we exchanged contact information.
We kept in touch and a few months later, I went to visit her.
I saw Ms. Blue.
Visit UC Santa Cruz Seymour Center to see the real thing. The photo doesn't do a smidgeon of justice to it. Ms. Blue was a sight to behold - 87 feet skeleton of a blue whale that is one of the largest of any kind displayed anywhere in the world. It's mind-boggling. It inspires awe.
Here is a short history of how this came about -
For reasons still unknown, a dead blue whale washed ashore at Fiddlers Cove near Pescadero on September 6, 1979. After several days of jurisdictional uncertainty, biologists and students from UC Santa Cruz began the long and fragrant task of “flensing,” removing the blubber and flesh from the whale. The process took nearly a month.
Transported by helicopter and truck to the marine lab, the skeleton lay in a grassy field just downwind of lab buildings for over a year before being buried. Burying allowed nature’s decomposers to clean away the remaining tissue and oil that saturated the bones. In the summer of 1985, the bones were unearthed and reconstruction began. Frank Perry, a local geologist and museum specialist, was hired to clean the bones and mount them for display. Working with lab staff and specialists from the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and the California Academy of Science, they constructed a steel framework to support the bones and recreate the proper arch of the spine.
The job was completed in late 1986.
In 1999, time came to dismantle Ms. Blue and move her to the present Seymour Center.
This seemed a perfect opportunity to perform a major refurbishing. During the original recovery process in 1979, some bones were lost to the tides, crushed under the 100-ton weight of the carcass, or stolen from the beach by souvenir hunters. Dr. Dave Casper, UC Santa Cruz veterinarian, stepped forward to re-create the 60 lost bones and complete the skeleton.Casper painstakingly created molds of the missing parts from bones loaned by other institutions or from similar ones in the existing skeleton.
He then cast each piece out of two-part polyurethane foam.
Each new bone was primed and painted. The rest of the skeleton was also repainted. Not only does Ms. Blue have new bones, but the steel framework supporting her has been raised to a height of 18 feet. The flipper bones, originally pinned close to the body, are now deployed away from the ribs in a swimming position.
The effect is breathtaking.
Standing beside the 18-foot jaw bones, even a grown man looks small.
The story of Ms. Blue from Dr. David Casper's keynote speech is remarkable and also hard to accept. He talks about this magnificent whale's life and the decade she lived in. Ms. Blue was mature, around 50 years old. If she was 50 in 1979, when she died, she must have been born in 1929, which was one of the worst periods in whale history.
According to Dr. David Casper -
Her lifetime spanned the most dramatic and terrible period in blue whale history. When she was born, the slaughter of whales was at its highest. In 1930, when she was in her first year of life, the Antarctic take of blues whales was 30,000 in one season! To put that in perspective, the estimated total pre-whaling blue whale population in the Antarctic was 200,000. By the time blue whales were protected in 1965, 350,000 blue whales had been killed and it was thought that less than 1000 survived.
Ms. Blue's story notwithstanding...
I can happily report that day was one of the best in my life. I saw dolphins up close and I got to know about them and interact with them in a way I had never done before. My friend, who worked with them was terrific with them - I could see the trust between her and the dolphins - and it was so moving to see. They were playful, joyful, and utterly captivating.
I can honestly say that I've very rarely had a happier day in my whole life.
The reason I decided to write about this experience (while keeping her name undisclosed to keep her privacy) was because four years later, I still think about that day often. A year later, we went on a whale watching trip (we go whale watching whenever we can and we live in a place where we can do that often) and it was another of those perfect days. The gorgeous sun, the clean, white lines of the boat, and the wind on our face, the blue of the water, and the wait and watch... until hours later, a glimpse of one, then another, and then another.
Certain experiences in our lives give us this kind of sheer joy that can't be put in words. Many people (I envy them) experience one of these days and decide on the spot - that is what they want to do for the rest of their lives. But what of the others? Who are not young anymore and cannot impulsively change careers or who have responsibilities and live in places from where such experiences cannot be had? What about us? What do we do?
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