When visiting the The New Bedford Whaling Museum in southeastern Massachusetts, you might want to be a little careful standing under their 65-foot-long blue whale skeleton. That’s because these blue whale bones are still leaking oil, even though the cetaceans have been dead for more than two decades.
Named King of the Blue Ocean – or KOBO In short: this rare skeleton of a blue whale has been on display in the museum since 2000. It still leaks because the blue whale’s bone marrow is packed with oil and is much oilier than human bone.
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“The marrow is oily and the oil is an energy source for these animals. Especially the baleen whales, which usually have a period of the year when they are not feeding,” Robert Rochasays the Associate Curator of Science and Research at the New Bedford Whaling Museum Popular science. “There is energy stored in the muscles and in the blubber, but the energy stored in the oil and the bones is a reserve energy source for them.”
Normally whale skeletons have been stripped of this oil by natural processes when it is buried on the seabed and picked apart by barnacles and other animals. However, KOBO was found on the bow of a ship. Despite being the largest animals in the world, blue whales are still no match for giant tankers and accidental ship attacks.
“KOBO was probably about five years old and estimated to have weighed about 35,000 pounds,” Rocha says. “He was accidentally killed by a 450-foot cargo ship transiting from Belgium to Providence, Rhode Island in 1998.”
The carcass was eventually towed to shore and dissected by scientists for examination. The recovery team didn’t really spend any time removing the oil from the bones by leaving them in the sun and treating them.
In 2010, the museum installed a special oil catcher to see how much oil they could catch. The catcher is located near the whale’s rostrum, near its bill, snout and vertebrae. Oil drips into the flask every day and the museum stocks 1,000 milliliters in a jar and another 200 milliliters in the collection containers.
“We have missed oil drops for over a decade,” Rocha says. “And it was certainly a lot wetter and messier those first ten years.”
Local radio host FUN107’s Chris Arsenault told CBS affiliate WPRI that ten years ago some oil was dropped on him when he visited the museum. He doesn’t hold any grudges for KOBO, though, and says the order was quite “pretty lucky.”
“I felt something wet on my neck, and there was a brownish tinge that ended up staining the back of my white collar shirt,” Arsenault recalled. “I had to get rid of it.”
The oil from skeletons like this was not used to light the lamps of the world during the heyday of whaling in the nineteenth century. It wasn’t until whaling facilities and factory ships came along the coast that whalers and eventually World War I soldiers could use the oil stored in the bones.
“British soldiers were able to control the whale oil market during World War I,” says Rocha. “They rubbed it on their feet to help prevent trench foot and some pilots are said to have applied it to their faces to protect against the wind and sun.”
[Related: We finally know how baleen whales make noise.]
It was also used in explosives, as glycerol is one of the byproducts of whale oil soap. When the glycerol is mixed with nitric and sulfuric acid the result is explosive nitroglycerin. This nitroglycerine was then used as a propellant for bullets and rockets in World War I and World War II.
“The funny thing about the chemistry, though, is that it has to be the oil from baleen whales,” says Rocha. “Toothed whale oil has waxy esters that cannot be used for glycerol and nitroglycerin. But because of those waxy esters, their oil was used as a lubricant.”