Paleonet: burial of large carcass

[Jere H. Lipps]

Dear Raúl:

Very interesting problem.  I think it will be a 
long study.   We once dug up a very large whale 
that had been buried on a California beach for 
over a year, and it was still fairly well 
intact--stunk like XXXX.   Same with 12 of them 
that had washed ashore on one of CAs offshore 
islands a year or longer before.   Their skin and 
blubber protected the insides when they harden a 
little.   Last January, we camped near one on a 
beach in Baja California that was leaking fluids 
from certain areas of the carcass.  Most was of 
it not leaking because the blubber and skin 
seemed to contain it.   So it came out of the 
orifices and cuts on the skin or holes the 
vultures and gulls pecked into it.  The belly 
leaked a bit.   All of these fluids ran slowly 
and smellyly down the beach, and I'd image that 
would be true if it was all going on in the 
sub-sand.  I'm not sure what they were, nor did I 
want to find out.   They looked greasy and that 
might have characteristics that would flow 
differently than other fluids.  You should be 
ready for anything.  Maybe the fluids will just 
go straight down from the carcass.  Then you'd 
have to slant drill or probe it.  Probably should do that anyway.

You could try the pvc pipe, if it were perforated 
at the places you want to sample.  I think I'd 
trying coring the sand with a small bore tube 
(<cm) at the intervals and directions you judge 
best every so often.   Then analyse the pore 
waters trapped inside that--more natural.   You 
could do as many as seem needed to construct the 
pore water patterns.  You could refill the holes 
but don't sample in exactly the same place 
again.  I'd also buy a bunch of thermal buttons 
that you can set to measure temperature on time 
intervals so that you could collect a year's 
worth of data before resetting them and bury them 
at places around the carcass.  Be nice to get a 
bunch of measurements of other things--pH, 
porosity of the sand, salinity, natural water 
content, etc, etc.  I suspect that the fluids 
from the critter will change over time as they 
age, lose volatiles, harden or whatever they will do.

Not sure environmentalists or recyclers can help 
much.   They usually want to blow up the whale, and this leads to bad results
(http://youtube.com/watch?v=nGVkHl-nBhE).  Others 
have simply tied them off in the water and let 
the scavengers take care of them.  All gone in a 
month or so except for bones at the bottom.  Wise 
ones bury them, but they sure don't want to see 
what's going on under that sand!  Recyclers take 
them away and grind them up for dog food.

You know, you might do some experiments in the 
lab with parts of a whale first, just to get some 
idea of what might happen before you get one to bury.

Let me know what you do, please.   Fascinating stuff.

Jere


>Dear paleonetters:
>
>I have a question related to experimental taphonomy.
>
>I'm planning on burying a medium- to large-sized 
>carcass of a marine animal (whale, dolphin, 
>turtle) on a beach on a relatively isolated 
>area, outside of human influence, and then 
>monitor it for water chemistry as it decomposes 
>over time. I wonder if any of you have done that 
>or know of any similar experiments in the past 
>or present, which could provide some 
>orientation. The idea is ascertain the changes 
>that happen in the pore water and sediment 
>around the decaying carcass, changes that could 
>affect potential fossilization. Since marine 
>carccasses of these sizes are rare to get and we 
>must act really quickly, I want to avoid 
>mistakes and maximize both efforts and outcome. 
>A colleague told me to bury some PVC pipes in 
>vertical position and at different distances 
>from the carcass, then at regular intervals of 
>time retrieve some pore water and analyze it for 
>chemical content. Maybe I should contact people 
>working at environmental departments or agencies, but where or who?
>
>I would appreciate any suggestion.
>
>Raúl Esperante, PhD
>Paleontologist
>resperante at llu.edu
>_______________________________________________
>Paleonet mailing list
>Paleonet at nhm.ac.uk
>http://mailman.nhm.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/paleonet
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.paleonet.org/pipermail/paleonet/attachments/20071217/a2a4b080/attachment.htm>