‘Not very pretty’: Whale carcass to be recovered by SA Museum as big ‘stench’ heats up 

The smelly carcass of a rare whale, which has been mauled by sharks and left to rot on a northern Adelaide beach, will be cut up and removed by SA Museum staff and the local council.

WARNING: This story contains graphic content that readers may find distressing.

Sei whales, which typically spend most of their time well out to sea, died after being caught on the bow of a cargo ship before being pushed into Outer Harbour last month.

Onlookers were in awe as great white sharks mauled the carcass close to shore, but the feeding frenzy also made it difficult for the National Parks and Wildlife Service to secure a rope around the whale so it could be towed back out to sea.

It has since floated with the tides to various locations, including Section Bank (known as Bird Island), before getting beached on the mudflats at St Kilda from where residents have been complaining about an increasingly strong smell.

“It’s now come up on the beach and we consider it partly our responsibility to do something about it for the sake of our residents.

“Certainly, I believe the stench is really nasty.”

Warm week ahead

Adelaide’s maximum temperatures are forecast to reach 26 degrees Celsius on Thursday and 27C on Friday, which is expected to result in an increased smell.

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Mayor Aldridge said the council had previously tried with SA Museum to tow the whale away but it did not work because the whale had deteriorated too much.

She said museum staff would now cut up the whale to extract its bones in a clean-up that would take three to four days.

A first for SA

SA Museum senior mammals researcher Doctor Catherine Kemper said her staff were excited to be dealing with the “very special” species in a first for SA.

“They will collect hopefully the whole skeleton, which is fantastic for us as this may be only the second [sei whale] specimen in an Australian museum,” she said.

“They’re probably not terribly common in Australian waters.”

She said its bones would be sent to the museum’s Bolivar warehouse to be macerated in “warm water for probably up to a year”.

“Most of our specimens go into scientific collection behind the scenes,” Dr Kemper said.

“But our collections are used by researchers and other people from around the world … [who] either come here or we provide them photos or information data.”

A difficult task

SA Museum mammals collection manager David Stemmer said it would not be an easy task to recover the whale skeleton, due to its advanced state of composition.

“The principal of getting into it will be the same,” he told ABC Radio Adelaide’s Spence Denny.

“We need to remove the blubber first and then the soft tissue underneath, the muscle, the organ, and once we get to the bones, we will be cutting them out one by one to remove eventually the entire skeleton.

“The skeleton, which won’t be very pretty once it comes out of the rotting carcass, will come to our Bolivar preparation facility where it will be macerated in our big outdoor tank.”

He said the smell was “pretty strong” but most of his helpers had been around rotting carcasses before, although “not of that size”.

“It’s just matter of breathing, and you get used to it and eventually you don’t notice,” Mr Stemmer said.

Too decomposed for post-mortem

Dr Kemper said researchers would try and determine the whale’s sex and age but a post-mortem was unlikely to be carried out due to the advanced state of decomposition.

She said it was common for whales worldwide to be killed by cargo ships.

“The whale may be sleeping or a little bit dozy at the surface, and a huge container ship comes in a at a fair rate of knots and the whales gets hung up on the bow and dies,” Dr Kemper said.

She said that while SA Museum would remove the bones, the council has arranged to remove the rest of the carcass, which will be composted.