When a whale dies, its body descends to the bottom of the deep sea in a transformative phenomenon called a whale fall. A whale’s death jump-starts an explosion of life, enough to feed and sustain a deep-ocean ecosystem for decades.
There are a lot of ways whales can die. Migrating whales lose their way and, unable to find their way back from unfamiliar waters, are stranded. They can starve when prey disappears or fall to predators such as orcas. They become bycatch, tangled in fishing lines and nets. Mass whale deaths have been linked to marine heatwaves and the toxic algae blooms that follow.
And because of their enormous size – and the relentless rise in global ship traffic – whales are now especially vulnerable to ship strikes. An estimated 20,000 whales are fatally hit each year; sometimes a ship captain rolls into harbor unaware a 40-ton body is draped across their bow.
But whales can also wash ashore. What happens next depends on tide, weather and the creatures – human, avian, canine, scavenger – who share that coastline. Sometimes the dead whale becomes a problem, sometimes a spectacle, sometimes a question no one is ready to answer.
Last winter, one such death unfolded in Alaska, when a young fin whale washed up near downtown Anchorage and froze on to the tidal flats. The aftermath – months of fascination, bureaucratic drift and an unlikely retired air force pilot intent on giving her a second life – showed just how tangled our relationship to dead whales has become.
And Anchorage’s dilemma is part of a broader pattern: once a whale lands on shore, well, someone has to decide what happens to the body.
It was cold on 16 November 2024 – 3F to 20F – when the whale washed ashore near downtown Anchorage. The cold made it extremely difficult for Noaa biologists and Alaska Veterinary Pathology Services to perform a necropsy on her two-year-old body.
Scientists and volunteers from the Alaska marine mammal stranding network, dressed in Helly Hansen foul-weather bibs, insulated muck boots, and orange fisher’s gloves, excised quadrilateral chunks of frozen flesh and blubber to create windows to the whale’s interior. While pathology results would take months to come back (and would not, in this individual’s case, reveal any distinct cause of death), scientists saw no evidence of obvious illness, malnutrition or the blunt trauma of ship strike.
To decide what to do with the body, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (Noaa) employs a flowchart, a classic government-issue choice-making matrix, to help officials decide what to do with a dead whale. Considerations include: can you move the whale without its putrefying flesh disintegrating? How much cellular decomposition gas has built up inside?
In other words: do you have a ticking whale-bomb on your city beach?
If you need to move the whale – whose body, depending on its age and species, may be larger than any dinosaur that ever lived – viable options range from incinerating the carcass or burying it, sinking it offshore or transferring it to a landfill.
(Perhaps the worst way to deal with an inconveniently parked whale is to blow it up with 1,000lb of dynamite, as the coastal community of Florence, Oregon, did in 1970. “It was like a blubber snowstorm, with tiny particles of blubber floating down after the big chunks,” reporter Larry Bacon recalled 50 years later.)
While Anchorage’s urban coastline has seen a handful of cetacean strandings in recent years, for the fin – a dedicated deep-sea dweller – to have traveled so far inland as the upper Cook Inlet, was strange indeed. No one could figure how this particular whale had died, or what circumstance or current had carried her so far from the open ocean. And while the biologists expected her body to be pulled back into the water with the next big tide, full moons came and went, and she stayed put, her 47ft carcass frozen in place, as days grew shorter and silt turned to ice.
Over the winter, she drew crowds. On Google Maps, a pin for “The Whale” marked her exact location, which proved useful as her snow-covered form fused, visually and physically, with the urban seascape.
In spring, when the sea ice began to thaw, so did the whale. Her aroma became problematic, especially for the Anchorage residents whose million-dollar homes share that seashore, whose front doors were literally steps away from the carcass. Something needed to be done.
James Grogan, a former air force test pilot turned museum director, was also watching. A self-described “uber ultra wacko conservative”, he had served 23 years in the military. Tall, fit and sporting a buzz cut, he talks fast and looks as if he stepped out of a 1950s military portrait.
Retired and living in Wasilla, he had been volunteering at the nearly defunct Museum of Alaska Transportation and Industry, which opened in Anchorage in 1967 as the Air Progress Museum. With no funding to speak of and faded leadership, the museum was about to shut its doors.
Three years ago, Grogan, who loves an ambitious project, took the helm of that sinking ship. He is now rebranding as the Museum of Alaska, of which he is the director, curator, painter, grant writer, cleaner all in one. And to keep the museum alive, he needs to engage the community – especially the young people.
As he followed the case of the Anchorage fin whale, it dawned on him: if he could bring the whale to the museum, he could reconstruct her skeleton for display and give her the “chance to keep teaching”. As no one else seemed to want or know what to do with the whale, he began researching what it would take to get her to his museum.
Under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, it is illegal for anyone besides scientists and Native Alaskans to disturb a dead whale. Undeterred, Grogan consulted the Native corporations, who have first dibs on whale carcasses in Alaska, asking their permission to pursue government permits. Armed with letters from the Native corps, he began calling museum curators and scientists across the country for practical advice, and he got letters from the Department of Interior in Washington DC and the Alaska department of fish and game.
Ultimately, Grogan earned permission to harvest the whale from the tidal flats at Fish Creek.
In March, Grogan recruited volunteers, including university students in white hazmat suits and Wasilla high school students, who moved blubber to a more favorable location, where the next tide was likely to wash it away. Even with all the help, the process was more than he had bargained for. “I was ignorantly thinking the whale would be like a moose. I could just go over there one afternoon, harvest the moose, take the bones. It took me three weeks.”
Knee-deep in whale carcass alongside scientists and academics, Grogan found himself surrounded by people with worldviews that were starkly different from his own. “I’m like a flat Earther,” he said, recalling debates with volunteers as they labored side by side, covered in rancid cetacean offal and sea muck.
“Flat Earther” is an improbable qualifier to Grogan’s previous title of pilot. When I highlight this incongruency, he jogs it back a bit, assuring me that, no, he doesn’t actually believe the Earth is flat. But when he is in a room with “a lot of parchment”, with researchers or scientists or people with fixed opinions, he leans into the way he assumes they perceive him. Because he is an outspoken conservative, and he does not subscribe to the ideologies touted by your typical museum curator or natural historian.
“Her pelvis bones are like this big.” With his index finger and thumb, he makes the gesture for something improbably tiny, which whale pelvises are. A commonly held theory is that whale pelvises are vestigial, which means they are regarded as now-useless remnants of whales’ terrestrial past: evolutionary leftovers. Many cetaceans have vestigial hind limbs, phantom leg-bones that are no longer attached to the rest of the skeleton and instead “float” in the flesh, seemingly without purpose – beyond, perhaps, corroborating an evolutionary trajectory from land to water.
For Grogan, though, anatomy and fossil records do not add up as proof of evolution.
“When we started carving her up, some of the biologists from the university were like, ‘Well, that just shows evolution at work.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, or the work of the great Creator that did this.’”
Before taking over the museum, Grogan taught middle school for five years at Wasilla’s Our Lady of the Valley Catholic school. “I’m not Catholic, but I had fun. I’m a huge anti-Darwinist. Because Darwin’s been proven, by his own documentation and own work, false 1,000 times. What’s the real truth is still anybody’s guess.”
While Grogan, for his part, believes the Earth is perhaps 8,000 to 10,000 years old, his point is that no one living today can actually prove the age of ancient things.
“Here’s the largest mammal in the world, who eats the tiniest animals [krill, plankton], and sucks it all in through that silly baleen. So again, when people say ‘evolution’, I say, why in the world would she want to do that? Why wouldn’t she just grow legs and eat steak like the rest of us?”
Out on the mudflats, the team worked fast, placing the salvaged bones in sleds and hauling them by ATV to waiting trucks. Still, the spine was frozen to the mud, and they had no choice but to leave it.
A month later, in late April, Grogan and a few volunteers went back out, this time with a burly Hägglunds all-terrain rig. When temperatures warm, the mud becomes soft and dangerous, taking on characteristics of quicksand. There are signs on the coastal trail warning hapless out-of-state walkers to stay off the mudflats. “I believed and respected the mudflat rumors,” Grogan said, “but I really had no idea.” At one point during the harvest, Grogan got a foot stuck, the mud suctioned fast around it. It took ropes and two people to free his foot from the mud; to retrieve his boot, the team had to blow compressed air around it to set it free.
The crew collected what bones they could before a high tide suddenly floated the carcass, sending it west. Grogan deemed it too dangerous to go back out on to the mud in a vehicle. He asked around for a crane. He was about to give up.
Then, a week later, another big tide shoved what was left of the fin squarely up against the shore. “A friend called and said: ‘Hey, she’s back!’” That same afternoon, Grogan and a volunteer from Alaska Veterinary Pathology Services were back at the carcass.
They staked the vertebrae to the beach, hoping she would stay put through one more high tide. Anxiously, Grogan waited. That tide went out, and he scrambled back out to the whale, hopeful. With chainsaws and volunteers from a towing company in Anchorage, he said: “We got her out!”
Once the bones were on the trucks and headed north to Wasilla, all that was left of the fin was a slick of blubber and fleshy residue, floating just off the shore.
I visited Grogan’s museum in July, where he agreed to take me on a tour de baleine, or a whale-watching tour. There, nestled among old train cars, was the fin’s tail, all thawed out, covered in black flies and an iridescent film, slowly decomposing.
Beneath mounds of manure and hay, microbes ate the remaining flesh off the rest of the whale’s bones. One mound covered her spine and ribs; the other, her skull. The process is called maceration, and you can do it in the Earth or in maceration tanks, which are essentially big, stinky aquariums. Grogan said he was gleaning what wisdom he can from curators who have done this before. He did not know how long maceration would take, given Alaska’s extreme temperatures, and he still needed to identify funding to complete the fin whale project.
I asked him how he thinks the fin whale skeleton fits into the collections at a museum of industry. Without hesitation, he asserted that Alaska has always been an oil state: at first, it was oil from whales and now it’s oil from the Earth, from the seafloor. “Whales were Alaska’s first industry,” he said. Indeed, 100 years before crude was tapped at Prudhoe Bay, the Yankee whaling fleet hunted Arctic whales to the brink of extinction.
“As much as I’m ‘drill, baby, drill’”, Grogan said, he also wants the Alaskan maritime industry to take a beat and consider the consequences of unchecked progress. In terms of offshore oil extraction, he said: “There’s got to be a responsible way to drill that considers the animals on the North Slope.
“From the beginning of human history, written history, God gave us responsibility. We have to do the right thing, even though the right thing might be tough.” For Grogan, the ineffable complexity and beauty of the fin whale supports the story he believes, the biblical story of dominion. “God put us in charge to be stewards, not to abuse that power.”
To that end, Grogan said he was now attempting to work with state leadership to introduce legislation to protect all whales – not just the endangered Cook Inlet belugas – from ship strike. “Let’s keep those ships moving,” he said – but not at the expense of whales.
I asked him how his work with the fin whale had changed him. “I’m a pilot. I believe in science and physics. But I’m outside the box when it comes to history and floods. If anything, [the fin whale] has solidified my beliefs. When I got inside of her and saw her amazing complexity on a non-cellular level – tendons, fins, how her snout is designed to let her dive down to 2,000ft, and chambers in her cranium, all unbelievably complex – I think, there’s got to be a Creator out there who said: ‘I’m gonna make this creature unique.’”
With an impish grin, Grogan reflected on his transformation. “I went from being a ‘let the world burn’ kind of guy, to a conservative save-the-whales Greenpeace fanatic.”
