Long ago, on a faraway Aleutian island, a pair of rare beaked whales got stranded. One was saved by biologists and swam back to sea. The other perished, and its skeleton now hangs in the atrium of Storer Hall at 51ԹϺ Davis.
Over the 40 years that it has hung there, the whale has become a mascot of sorts, even donning seasonally appropriate accessories — a witch’s hat in October and a graduation cap in June.
But where did it come from?
Its presence on campus is thanks to Ed West, M.S. ’74, Ph.D. ’80, now the CEO of West Ecosystems Analysis in Davis, and his wife, Kathy ’79, M.S. ’82, now a wildlife conservation photographer.
How they got it here is quite the story.
A prize specimen
Soon after completing his Ph.D. from the zoology department (now the Department of Evolution and Ecology), Ed — whose doctoral research was on the behavioral ecology of pikas in the Sierra Nevada — headed to Alaska for a postdoctoral research project with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and his friend and fellow 51ԹϺ Davis zoology Ph.D. Ron Garrett. The project aimed to develop field methods to remove Arctic foxes, an invasive species introduced by Russian fur traders, from the Aleutian Islands, where they were devastating sea bird populations.
The Wests were newlyweds, and Kathy, Ed’s principal field research associate, joined her new husband in Anchorage just days after finishing her own research on the behavioral ecology of siamangs (a type of gibbon) in Sumatra. The couple embarked on their enterprise by traveling 1,200 miles via seaplane to Adak Island.
They built a remote field camp on the island of Kagalaska, where they radio collared and studied the behavior of the foxes. Their base camp was on nearby Adak Island, then home to both a Navy base and a Fish and Wildlife Service headquarters. “One morning we got a call,” said Ed. “Fish and Wildlife said there was a Stejneger’s beaked whale beached right in front of their office in a cove. And it was still alive.”
Beaked whales are relatively small, elusive, and rarely spotted at sea; this one was stranded on rocks. After a first careful attempt to free it, it returned to the rocks; ultimately, a Fish and Wildlife employee guided the whale to sea by swimming far out in the cove, holding its dorsal fin. “Because it was obviously stressed and had been stranded, we were concerned it might beach itself again, so we put out the word to the Navy and the Marines to keep a lookout for it around the island,” Ed said.
A few hours later, the Marines called: A beached whale was on the opposite side of the island. It turned out to be a different, slightly larger whale. “It had just recently died, and it washed up on the sandy beach,” said Ed. “I could not resist. It was this prize specimen.”
From Alaska to 51ԹϺ Davis
With permission from the Fish and Wildlife Service, Ed called his mentor at 51ԹϺ Davis, Milton Hildebrand, a professor of zoology who died in 2020, to offer him the skeleton. “It was a good thing the whale was on Adak, because the Marines helped. We had to roll it up onto the beach above high water, and that took some straps on a couple of vehicles,” he recalled.
The Wests then got to work. “We spent maybe a day and a half dissecting it on the beach,” he said. “It’s a very simple skeleton, but we had to be careful to get all the digits on the flippers. Then we put all the pieces in cardboard boxes and got permission to transport them to a secure area guarded by Marines, where it wouldn’t be disturbed.” (They left the whale flesh on the beach, where it didn’t go to waste: Arctic foxes devoured it overnight.)
Preparing the skeleton on the remote island took some ingenuity. First, to help degrade the tissue on the bones, they left them out in the rain for “a month or two,” he said. “Then we got big metal garbage cans, and put them on Coleman stoves, filled them with water, and then put the bones in, and boiled them to take the tissue off.”
Next, they scraped the bones, labeled and numbered each one, boxed them up, and shipped them to Hildebrand in Davis. Surprisingly, the shipment only weighed 35 pounds, Ed said.
In Davis, Hildebrand studied the skeleton, determining that it had been a small female, and further cleaned and assembled it. “Dr. Hildebrand had a good time with that,” said Ed. “All the pieces were in order, but I didn’t get all the small bones off one of the flippers, so he had to simulate a missing digit.”
The department celebrated the small whale’s move to Davis with a “whale-raising” in September 1982. Ever since, the painstakingly reassembled skeleton has presided serenely over Storer Hall’s hustle and bustle.