Modern blue whales in the northern Atlantic tend to spend their summers feeding around Iceland, Norway and as far north as the Arctic Circle. While blue whales can live to a hundred years old, Hope may have been as young as 15 when she stranded.ĭr Clive Trueman, who is based at the University of Southampton and conducted the isotope work looking into Hope's movements, revealed that about seven years before she died, Hope was living in the subtropical waters of the Atlantic - perhaps the Azores, Cape Verde or Mauritania.Īfter spending at least a year feeding and growing in these waters, Hope began migrating. Eventually all that remained was a 4.5-tonne skeleton, which was sold to the Natural History Museum for £250.Īfter spending decades in the Museum's Mammals gallery, in 2017 the skeleton was remounted in Hintze Hall so that the whale, which has since been named Hope, can greet visitors as they enter the Museum.įor almost 130 years, that has been the sum knowledge of this unfortunate whale's life.īy analysing the chemical make-up of the whale's baleen - the flexible plates that hang inside a whale's mouth - the researchers have found three distinct phases in Hope's relatively short life. The whale was then auctioned off, her body butchered and blubber boiled down. The whale was young and not yet fully grown, but that didn't stop the locals from taking great interest in the 25.2-metre leviathan from the deep that had been grounded so close to shore.Īfter two pitiful days struggling in the shallows, a lifeboat pilot named Ned Wickham rammed an improvised harpoon under the whale's flipper, finally putting the poor animal out of its misery. On the morning of 25 March 1891, a blue whale migrating up the east coast of Ireland was caught by the low tide and stranded on a sandbar just out from the harbour town of Wexford.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |