Through every season, tide cycle, and rainy day the circle of life endures. If a whale dies, and washes up on your local shore, how do the powers that be preserve it?

According to four-time whale conservator and marine biologist Rus Higley, step one is simple. Higley runs Highline’s Marine Science and Technology Center (MaST), as an educator he knew the power of having a local whale on display. 

“When they were building [the MaST center] there was an architectural drawing that had this huge hallway and I was like ‘I want to put a whale here,’” said Higley.

Though co-workers laughed off Higley’s whale-shaped endeavors, he continued his quest.  

Step 1: Start asking questions. 

“So I sent an email to some of my colleagues and I’m like, in the next year I want to learn the [answer to] these questions: How do you get a permit? How do you clean a whale? How do you hang a whale? Can the building support it? I knew nothing,” continued Higley.

Step 2: Gather information and wait for your whale

“Two hours after I sent the email, I got a call from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). And the person there is Kristien, and she’s like ‘Rus, I know you want a whale, I know you’re not ready for a whale, but I have a whale and I need an answer now.’”

“And I’m like, ‘What am I committing Highline to if I say yes? Could I lose my job?’ And it was such a cool opportunity. They needed it towed by a boat… I had access to a boat, so I said yes.” 

Higley now had his whale. 

Step 3: Start the necropsy 

“When a marine mammal, like a whale, strands, they’re going to do what’s called a necropsy… like an animal autopsy. The skeleton is 38 feet long & the bones alone weigh 1,500 lbs. When he was fleshed, he weighed about 40,000 lbs… They look for those [signs of death]. Once they’ve done that, at that stage the experts are done and [the whale] needs to be disposed of…So they turned it over to us.”

While the cause of death still remains unknown, Higley was left with a 40,000lb whale.

Step 4: Enlist some help.

Higley went to his students that quarter, “I literally went to my students in class and I said ‘Hey this weekend we’re going to cut up a whale. At the end of the day you’re going to throw your clothes away because they smell so bad. Would any of you like to help me?’”

At first, there was speculation on if ruining their clothes and cutting up a whale was worth it, but Higley found a nice surprise in his class.

“We had too many people. We had to turn away people. We took 20 the first day, and we took 20 the second day and cut up the whale,” he recounted. 

Step 5: Begin the big chop.

Higley expanded on what chopping it up is like. “So you’ve cut up a chicken, or a turkey? This is a 20 ton turkey. Probably when you cut up the chicken, you kept the meat and threw away the bones. We just reversed that. To give you an idea of scale, the tongue weighed an estimated 800 lbs. Just the tongue. We threw that away, and cut [the rest] into pieces.”

Step 6: Start the composting process, to de-meat your bones.

“You maybe had a compost in your backyard sort-of-thing and you put bad food, or dead food in there and it turns into soil? Well guess what? Mother nature does the same thing for whales.” Decomposers in the soil, like worms and bacteria, break down organic matter of dead animals, leaving bones behind. Fossils are the mineralized remains of these bones, but Higley wasn’t going to let his whale go that far. 

“All the nasty stuff the compost takes care of. So we compost [the whale] in horse manure [to] kind of jump start the compost. Then 6-8 months later, you dig it up, wash it with soap and water and you have clean bones,” Higley explained. “It’s actually really easy to get rid of the goo.” 

Step 7: Put your whale back together again.

“Now we have this giant IKEA puzzle, that we do not have the directions to. So you kind of invent it as you go. And we found a space to build it…but one of the issues was, where it was built was not where it was going.”

“We have two doors that open up into our building. It had to fit through the doors. So that meant the ribs came off, the spine came off, the head came off, the arms came off, right? It was built modular and then we brought it in, and lifted it up.” 

The process of building it in parts and then transporting those parts to the MaST center required a specific permit, which the MaST had. Higley reminisced on driving around with the giant whale skull in the back of his pickup truck.

Step 8: Reflect on and summarize the experience.

“We had over 100 people involved over two years, from dead on the beach to hanging in the hall,” Higley concluded.

The Arroyo Beach Gray Whale has hung from the MaST Center’s main hallway since 2012, and he’s been studied by hundreds of community members and marine enthusiasts on a weekly basis. 

The MaST Center is open to the public for free on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.