Not such a whale of a time

WHEN THE WHALE WAS WEE, THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN MODERN MONEY (PHOTO: BJEARWICKE)

Having a splinter embedded in your finger is deeply irritating, so imagine having a lump of metal embedded in your shoulder for over a hundred years. This was the plight of a bowhead whale featured in a news story with a rather marvellous headline today - 19th century bomb found in whale.

Well, quite. The bomb was actually time-delay harpoon, and apparently would have been ‘uncomfortable’ for the whale. Possibly a slight understatement, but we’ll let it slide. Experts think the whale was probably born around the time of the American civil war, and then speared 30 or so years later, as the ‘bomb’ was of a type manufactured between 1879 and 1885. That would make the animal well over a hundred years old.  It would presumably have kept on swimming for a while yet had he not been fished by a hunter off Alaska. The whale wasn’t illegally taken, it was part of an quota that indiginous hunters are allowed each year, as an exemption from the morotorium on hunting. But it’s apparently reasonably rare to find a centenarian whale, so it’s sad that this particuluar invididual is swimming no more, bomb or no bomb.