The Whale

On the volcanic island of La Palma biologists unravel a massive mystery. Is it a crime scene, a treasure or a dream come true? And in the town of Trinidad a grade school trip to the ocean is about to get beautiful, raw, and wild. Whalecano On the volcanic island of La Palma biologists unravel a massive mystery. Is it a crime scene, a treasure or a dream come true? A huge thank you to Paula Alonso, and Dr. Antonio Fernandez for sharing your story with Snap! Produced by Erick Yáñez, with help from Anna Sussman. Original score by Nicholas Marks. Translation by Elvis Di Marcantonio. Art by Teo Ducot. The Trinidad Whale In the town of Trinidad a grade school trip to the ocean is about to get beautiful, raw, and wild. Special thanks to Trinidad elementary’s seventh grade class: Alana, Jolena, Xavier, Joda and Atticus. Thanks as well to the third grade class: Remy, Harriet, Emmett Bowman, Margie Cunningham and Emmett Bowman. Big thanks also to The Marine Mammal Stranding network at Cal Poly Humboldt, Alison Lewis, Dr. Dawn Gulley, The Trinidad Rancheria, Ron Sundberg, Selena Rowan, Dessa Gunning, and Jessica Gravelle. Produced by Sukey Lewis, original score by Renzo Gorrio, engineering by Dirk Schwarzhoff. Season 17 - Episode 41 Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

• 0:07Speaker 00

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• 0:52Speaker 00

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• 1:11Speaker 01

  If you ever want to remind yourself of how small we are, how limited, go out, find someone who knows things to take you on their boat into the ocean, then cut off the engine for a while.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Just be. Wait, wait, bow around the infinite blue. And then, this is important, very important. Get cosmically lucky. Have a pod of whales breach next to your boat from all sides. Feel the weight, the power of an alien intelligence, giant beyond imagining, twisting, turning almost as if to get a better look at you.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  And then, just short of contact, watch them decide enough and dive back into their own universe.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  And I don't know how it changed me. I just know I'm not the same. And today, we're going back to the water. Snap Judgment proudly presents The Whale. I know it's in Washington. Remember, it is so much better to be lucky than to be smart when you're listening to Snap Judgment.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Now, for today's story, we take you to La Palma, a small Spanish island in the Canary Islands acapella go. This is a place where most of the time, life moves slowly. People farm their land. They stop to have coffee with their neighbors. You know, it's the kind of place where not much happens, except that in recent years, La Palma has made international news twice. And both times because of the forces of nature. And today, we want to tell you the story about something incredible that came from the sea. Before that, there was something that came from the land. Producer Eric Yáñez brings us a story. Snap Judgment.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  It's September 2021, and a volcano has erupted on La Palma.

• 4:01Speaker 03

  Se veía una humareda inmensa, negra y una explosión. Y la humareda cada vez era... estaba más elevada, parecía que llegaba al cielo.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  First, they saw the smoke. And then, an explosion erupted the island.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  This enormous tongue of lava, this massive black wall.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  Esa lengua tremenda, esa mole negra y debajo, cric, cric, cric, cric, cric, del sonido de la lava.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  And underneath that wall, this crackling sound of lava moving.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  And from that moment on, everything was the volcano.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  There was a reporter speaking live on television. And suddenly, just two or three kilometers behind him, the first explosions appeared.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  And then, we heard what sounded like thunder and saw a dark cloud burst out of the earth. That's Dr. Antonio Fernández. He's a scientist and a wildlife veterinarian. And as someone born on the island, he knows that volcanoes are just part of the land's history.

• 5:48Speaker 04

  La Palma is a volcanic island. In the last 75 years, there have been three eruptions. It's a place where you learn to live with the forces of nature. But this volcano was different. It struck the island at its core.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  For three months, everyone watched as lava moved across the island. It wiped out entire neighborhoods, churches, schools, cemeteries. Nearly 7,000 people were forced to evacuate and relocate to nearby towns. You see, this wasn't one of the island's existing volcanoes erupting. It was a new one, literally forming right under people's feet. The first craters opened just a few kilometers from where people lived. This new volcano didn't even have a name. Only later did it become known as Tajo Gaita.

• 6:55Speaker 04

  I call it the island's scar. It's a turning point in the life of the island.

• 7:05Speaker 04

  All I wish for La Palma and its people is that the volcano gives back what it took from them, and then some.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  It had been two years after the Tajo Gaita explosion. La Palma was still recovering from the destruction. And this is when something else happened, something completely different. And once again, La Palma was in the headlines. But this time, it wasn't because of something that emerged from the land. It was because of something that came from the sea.

• 7:50Speaker 05

  We were in the lab in the university as any other day. You know, just a normal, random day of PhD students running around the lab nonstop.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  That's Paula Alonso. She's also a wildlife veterinarian.

• 8:06Speaker 05

  And suddenly, we got a call.

• 8:11Speaker 05

  There's a sperm whale. It just stranded on La Palma, which is one of the most remote islands here in the Canary Islands, in the most remote beach ever.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  Paula was working at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, about 150 miles away, on a neighboring island.

• 8:34Speaker 05

  And we started receiving a lot of calls, right? Because like, boats were seeing it, people were seeing it, police were seeing it.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  Across the world, there's something called a stranding network, teams of veterinarians and scientists who respond when whales or dolphins wash ashore. Paula is part of one of those teams.

• 8:56Speaker 05

  We have to go now. If the animal is alive, it's very, very important to get there as soon as possible so the animal can be well taken care of, whether it is possible putting it back on the sea. And if it's not possible, maybe performing a humanitarian euthanasia, which is ending its suffering. And if the animal is dead, time is also very important because it limits the amount of information you're going to be able to gather because the corpse decomposes. So time is running against you.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  This is a big deal because in the Canary Islands, many whales wash ashore after being struck by ships. And there's growing pressure on the government to do something about it, to regulate ship traffic and prevent these collisions. It's becoming a whole political issue, and people are watching closely.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  So every stranded whale has to be treated like a crime scene, investigated, documented, reported. So it's crucial to get there, fast.

• 10:07Speaker 05

  Go, go, go, go. Grab the things, grab the suitcases. Okay, who's on duty, who's on call? It doesn't matter because we're all going. I think that day, we were about 10 to 15 people, maybe.

• 10:22Speaker 05

  We get in the plane. We're all very excited, but very focused, very professional. We carry very big luggages and suitcases with big knives, whaling even instruments. And of course, then, a lot of clothes to change because when you do a whale, you really have to change even your underwear. You will end up smelling like whale for days.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  Paula and the team fly on a small plane to La Palma and head to Playa de Nogales, a black sand beach tucked beneath steep cliffs on the island's northern coast.

• 11:03Speaker 05

  I can remember all the team wearing caps and kind of cowboy hats. It's very, very sunny, very warm.

• 11:17Speaker 05

  It was silent. It was absolutely silent. There is no one there and only the sound of the waves coming and crashing.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  When they reached the top of the cliffs overlooking the beach, they still didn't know what they were walking into.

• 11:37Speaker 05

  And we come down the cliff, almost running to get to the whale.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  There it was, a sperm whale, about the length of a bus, lying at the shoreline. A young male with his lower jaws slightly open, a big row of teeth that resembles a saw blade.

• 12:00Speaker 02

  It was already dead, not moving, not breathing.

• 12:04Speaker 05

  And he was huge. He was huge and he was in this beautiful, remote, wild beach. So the scenery was amazing, just seeing this giant creature of nature in this remote location.

• 12:20Speaker 05

  Whales, when they die, the process of decomposition of the body starts going on. We have a lot of bacterias inside of our intestine and our guts, and these bacterias start to ferment and produce gas, and they start bloating the animal. So if enough time passes, it can sometimes happen that the animal can actually explode.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  You've probably seen the videos, a dead whale on the beach, suddenly bursting open, blood and guts raining on bystanders. And while disgusting, that wasn't the team's main concern.

• 12:56Speaker 05

  My biggest fear at that point was really the tides coming in, because the animal was just right in the limit of the tide. We had maybe only five hours, and this is nothing for to perform a necropsy on a whale on the beach.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  Luckily, the person in charge of the necropsy that day was Antonio Fernandez. You met him before.

• 13:23Speaker 04

  You know, I've been doing autopsies for forty-two years now. As I tell my students, from a whale to a cockroach, they think I've done almost all of them.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  And almost immediately, Antonio noticed something really important. This whale had swum its way to the beach.

• 13:49Speaker 04

  If the whale had died out at sea, the currents would have carried the body south.

• 13:57Speaker 04

  But there were no external signs of any kind. If it had been struck by a ship, we would have seen an injury. There was none.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  So the main question was answered almost immediately. This wasn't a ship strike. The whale had come to the shore already dying from something else entirely. So now, the team's job is to go inside the whale and look for answers.

• 14:28Speaker 05

  And then we just get hands on the whale.

• 14:32Speaker 05

  We're removing from the neck until the fluke, until the tail, layer by layer, from the skin on. And the skin can be very, very, very, very thick. So even to remove the skin can take us up to three hours.

• 14:49Speaker 04

  We open the whole abdomen, cut through the skin, go through all the muscles to reach the bones.

• 14:55Speaker 05

  When you open up a whale, there's a lot of fat coming out, liquids coming out, everything's slippery. It really smells. It really smells, and it's not nice. It smells like

• 15:08Speaker 05

  a ton of rotten fish mixed with oil. And the oil actually kind of gets under your skin, even though of course you're wearing a lot of gloves. It just goes into your whole body.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  It is indeed a dirty job. Photos from that day show the team covered in thick overalls, rubber boots and gloves, standing around the whale, some of them climbing onto its back.

• 15:37Speaker 05

  There is a picture running through the internet, actually, of Antonio Fernandez using skin patches that he took off from the animal as a ladder. He had just cut small ladders in the skin of the animal, because it was so big that he couldn't reach the top.

• 15:58Speaker 05

  It's also physically very demanding. You're dealing with big knives, a lot of people exhausted, dehydrated. And I actually was feeling for the animal that has just died.

• 16:13Speaker 05

  In these situations, when you're confronting such a giant and amazing animal, there's always this empathy feeling. It's humbling. It can be even a bit overwhelming. But we're veterinarians and we're trained for this. So we really have to keep our heart within us, but at bay.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  For the next four hours, Paula, Antonio and the team keep working, cutting through layer after layer of tissue, slowly making their way towards the organs. But as they work, the tide is starting to come in, creeping closer and closer to the whale's body.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  Time is running out, and they still don't have an answer.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  When Snap returns, there's still a mystery hidden inside this sperm whale. But will the team be able to find it before the tide carries it away?

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Stay tuned.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment, the whale episode. When last we left, Dr. Antonio, Paula and the team were literally deep inside a whale, stranded on the beach. And they were trying to solve the big mystery. What killed it and brought it ashore? Snap Judgment.

• 17:55Speaker 04

  Closer to the stomach, there's a section of the intestine near the rectum. That's the last part we dissect.

• 18:03Speaker 04

  And that's where we found the problem. The intestine was obstructed, either partially or completely.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  Finally, something starts to make sense. An infection in the intestines, having spread throughout the body, eventually killing the whale.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  But what caused the infection, they still don't know. And now time's up.

• 18:37Speaker 04

  The police were already on the beach, telling us we had to get out of the carcass and stop the autopsy, because waves were starting to cover the whale.

• 18:48Speaker 04

  And it was becoming dangerous for the team working there.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  So that's it. The tide has come in. The whole team has to pick up their equipment and fly back home, without knowing exactly what killed the whale.

• 19:07Speaker 04

  But I had a suspicion.

• 19:10Speaker 04

  So I went in through the back of the animal and climbed inside, almost like Jonah in The Whale.

• 19:21Speaker 05

  He kind of slid down the whale, and he just bumped into something with his back.

• 19:31Speaker 04

  I stepped down, and suddenly I slipped backwards a little.

• 19:37Speaker 04

  And I bumped into something hard. But it wasn't a bone.

• 19:41Speaker 05

  And he just stood there with a funny face like, huh, what is this? And he turned around, and he saw that it was the end of the intestine that wasn't open yet. It was very big, very dilated, like a pipe that it's very, very dilated at one point. And he was kind of tapping on it, and it was very, very hard.

• 20:09Speaker 04

  And right in that hard spot, I dissected a little. Opened it.

• 20:17Speaker 04

  Put my hand inside and started feeling around.

• 20:22Speaker 05

  He started just like, yeah, looking for something there. Like there was something solid and hard that had crashed into him on his way down.

• 20:32Speaker 05

  All eyes went to him. We knew something was up.

• 20:37Speaker 04

  I grabbed something with both of my hands.

• 20:44Speaker 05

  And it was huge. It was huge.

• 20:50Speaker 05

  I've never, ever, of course, seen anything like this. Not me or anyone in the team. And it was just massive.

• 20:58Speaker 04

  I looked at everyone and said... Esto no habíamos terminado. No habíamos terminado. No. We were not finished yet.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  Whatever Antonio was holding was about the size of a watermelon.

• 21:16Speaker 05

  At that point, we knew it was a stone, so we knew it was ambergris.

• 21:25Speaker 05

  Ambergris is created when the animal eats things that cannot be digested. For example, the beaks of the squid are very hard. This material starts kind of merging together with the oils and the acids from the gastric compartments, and it starts creating like a stone, like a little mask.

• 21:45Speaker 04

  Scientifically, we call it a coprolif. It's just petrified whale poop.

• 21:56Speaker 04

  But it's covered in amber, and that can be worth half a million dollars, maybe even a million.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  The team had found gold. This thing that couldn't be excreted and ultimately killed the whale could be worth big money.

• 22:17Speaker 04

  Ambergris is the compound inside ambergris, and the pharmaceutical and perfume industries pay really well for it.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  For centuries, ambergris has been a kind of maritime legend. It appears in all the whaling stories, in trading records. It's even the title of Chapter 92 of Herman Melville's Moby Dick.

• 22:44Speaker 04

  I had read parts of Moby Dick, but now I just went looking for passages about ambergris, and there's this line I love.

• 22:53Speaker 04

  "Who would think then that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the stinky bowels of a sick whale?"

• 23:11Speaker 05

  We were all thrilled, silent.

• 23:16Speaker 05

  Is this what we believe it is? Of course it is. It's such a finding, and it's so valuable, and what were we gonna do with that? At that moment in the beach, it was us, the veterinary pathology team, a couple of biologists, who probably also knew, and then some people, maybe from the press or from the local government.

• 23:41Speaker 05

  Dr. Antonio was just holding the stone there in his hands, the nine-kilogram stone. But at that point, we couldn't make assumptions about the value of the stone, and it was up to Antonio to maybe say it to the people that was there.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  But on the beach, Antonio kept it simple. "Yes, it was ambergris. Yes, it was rare. But now," he said, "they have a job to finish."

• 24:12Speaker 05

  We took pictures, we measured everything, we cleaned it, because of course it was still with a lot of feces and intestinal material.

• 24:23Speaker 05

  When we finished the necropsy, we were all covered in blood, wrecked, very tired. We took the safety equipment and the clothes off. We kind of hiked up a bit in the cliff, and we found this beautiful kind of lake in the inside of the cliff.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  They were standing in front of a jameo, a pool of seawater inside the lava rock. Basically, a little swimming hole made by the volcano two years earlier.

• 24:57Speaker 05

  And we were all in swimsuits or underwear.

• 25:03Speaker 05

  And then we all jumped in the water, and we all just bathed on the lake with our professor, with Dr. Antonio Fernandez. He was just like a small kid jumping down the rocks, and we were just very happy, glad, knowing that we had made a great job and a great discovery.

• 25:25Speaker 02

  After the swim, the team packed up their remaining equipment and left the whale behind on the beach, where the tide would carry it away. The only thing they took with them was the stone.

• 25:38Speaker 05

  We brought it back on the plane. I don't know why they didn't kick us out that day, because we were all smelling like you cannot imagine.

• 25:49Speaker 02

  As the plane soared over La Palma, the team looked down at the island below. They could still see the destruction left behind by the tajagaita.

• 26:02Speaker 04

  We passed close to where the volcano is, to the crater itself.

• 26:07Speaker 05

  We can see destruction. A big black road where everything is not there anymore, and around it, a lot of houses.

• 26:19Speaker 04

  But I didn't look at it. It made me feel helpless to see that force of nature and the damage it had done.

• 26:28Speaker 05

  It's always touching, because it's one of the wildest and most green islands, and being marked by this big, black lava road is really, really something.

• 26:42Speaker 05

  And actually, Antonio, he said like, "Wow, it's amazing that in this island, that has suffered so much in the past years, and there's this many big, important things going on, it feels that maybe we could give back a bit."

• 27:03Speaker 05

  I think it was only four or five days ever since what happened. All of these news started coming up in the local newspapers, in the national newspapers, even in the international newspapers. There's a story of a half a million dollars stone that we're keeping here in this specific lab with a picture of our building. And then was when it hit us, like, "Okay, this is actually maybe big, or bigger than we thought it was. Let's find out more, because you know, we're vets. We know what ambergris is. We know it's super valuable, but I don't know how much a gram is worth exactly. I don't know."

• 27:48Speaker 05

  Could we sell it? Could we keep it? Science isn't very well-paid, and we were all excited, like, "Oh, could we scrap just with my nail just a bit and maybe buy a house?"

• 28:03Speaker 05

  There was a lot of excitement, and also uncertainty. I was worried. I was like, "Okay, so what do we do now?"

• 28:11Speaker 02

  As more people learned about the discovery, Antonio felt the pressure to say something publicly about what should happen next.

• 28:24Speaker 04

  The general public just wanted to know how much the stone was worth and who would keep it.

• 28:34Speaker 04

  Two or three days later, I made a decision. I was interviewed by a regional news outlet, and I said that if the stone ever turned into economic value, that money should go to the people affected by the volcano.

• 28:53Speaker 05

  And it made sense, because we, of course, we were all very excited, like, "Oh my God, this is worth so much money." But of course, maybe if it was legal, that island can sell it, and then it can pay for the volcano eruption disturbance that it created from the local people. But then, we wouldn't even know how to start... How do you sell that?

• 29:19Speaker 02

  Meanwhile, the team sent the stone out for chemical analysis. And when the results came back, they found that the stone was almost entirely ambergris, about 80%.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  So yes, the team really had found whale gold.

• 29:38Speaker 02

  But around the same time, they got an answer to the other question, the money question.

• 29:45Speaker 05

  The local government and administration people found out that it couldn't be sold. It was illegal to sell it.

• 29:54Speaker 05

  Historically, ambergris has been a very, very valued substance. Sperm whales were killed for this. But it's produced synthetically these days, luckily, so animals are not hunted anymore, at least not in Spain and Europe in general.

• 30:14Speaker 02

  So what do you do with a treasure like this if it can't be sold?

• 30:26Speaker 04

  The sperm whale had come to La Palma to die, and the only real, true owner of that stone, even though it had caused its death, was the sperm whale.

• 30:41Speaker 04

  So to me, the final purpose of the stone is very symbolic. If the sperm whale came to La Palma to die, then the coprolif should return to La Palma.

• 30:56Speaker 05

  It's such a big scientific discovery, but also, it's more of, metaphorically speaking, a romantic finding. You're actually there, you're actually seeing the animals, you've done a lot of work, and then you're just given that gift from nature. That was the most humbling experience I've ever had.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  For Antonio, this was a once-in-a-lifetime discovery. In 42 years of opening up animals, he had never actually found ambergris inside a whale. And as far as he knew, no one had.

• 31:45Speaker 04

  What truly mattered to me was that, after so many autopsies, so many whales, so many animals, I could finally say I had found a piece of ambergris before the end of my career.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  Today, there are parts of La Palma that art forever changed. Where neighborhoods once stood, there are now black lava roads. Where the lava reached the sea, new beaches have formed.

• 32:20Speaker 05

  It's kind of like, the cycle is completed, right? Nature is both creation and destruction, birth and death. And La Palma, in the last few years, was such an example of that. While nature being raw and being destructive, but also carrying so much birth. Nature takes and it gives back.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Today, the stone is on display at the Museo Insular de la Palma. Sitting on a big red cushion, a strange little monument to everything that the island has survived. A huge thank you to Paula Alonso, Dr. Antonio Fernandez for sharing your story with the Snap. Dr. Antonio's voice in English was performed by Elvis DiMarco Antonio. The original score was by Nicholas Marks. The story is produced by Eric Yáñez with help from Anna Sussman.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  After the break, another Whale of a Tale. Stay tuned.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment, the Whale episode. My name is Cam Washington. Next, we're going to Trinidad. Not Trinidad, Tobago, Trinidad, California. A tiny coastal town with a tiny, cool school. But it's about to go on the field trip of a lifetime. Snap Judgment.

• 34:11Speaker 06

  My name is Marjorie Cunningham, and I am a 7th and 8th grade teacher at Trinidad School. And so it was our turn to go down to the tide pools.

• 34:22Speaker 07

  At the beginning, I didn't really want to go on the field trip.

• 34:25Speaker 08

  I don't really like going down to the beach in the mornings because it's super cold.

• 34:29Speaker 09

  Normally, you never see anything that cool. But it got exciting quick.

• 34:37Speaker 10

  Yeah, my name is Emmett Bowman. I'm the 3rd grade teacher.

• 34:41Speaker 11

  We go to school here, and I'm in 3rd grade.

• 34:45Speaker 08

  We started walking down to the beach.

• 34:47Speaker 10

  And I was in the very front, guiding the 35 students or so, a couple of adults.

• 34:53Speaker 11

  It was kind of fun. I did fall and scrape my knee, but other than that, it was fun.

• 34:59Speaker 06

  Okay, no, everybody, keep walking. We're all sticking together.

• 35:02Speaker 08

  The ocean is a little choppy. We're in like the super rocky area of the beach.

• 35:08Speaker 10

  The tide was out, and the waves weren't really too dangerous where we were.

• 35:14Speaker 12

  There was the ocean in front of us, and then there was two rocks to the right and a rock to the left.

• 35:19Speaker 11

  I was looking at some fish and crabs.

• 35:22Speaker 06

  We get there, and there are two bald eagles.

• 35:28Speaker 06

  There was one that kind of swooped around a little bit and was kind of hunting. And I was saying to several students that this is a unicorn day.

• 35:38Speaker 11

  I really liked the anemones, but I just stuck my finger in it and I kind of pulled my finger. It felt funny.

• 35:46Speaker 09

  Every rock you would flip over, there would be like 20 crabs.

• 35:51Speaker 10

  20 crabs, 25 sea anemones, and 5 sea stars.

• 35:56Speaker 09

  We saw some kiting. That was pretty cool.

• 35:58Speaker 07

  And then we just played banana tag.

• 36:01Speaker 08

  Oh yeah, that was super fun. I know.

• 36:04Speaker 10

  So the kids are just running around, playing tag, all different grade levels. And it's going really good.

• 36:14Speaker 06

  Mr. Bowman, the 3rd grade teacher, was like, okay.

• 36:16Speaker 10

  3rd graders line up.

• 36:18Speaker 06

  As we're kind of lining up.

• 36:20Speaker 10

  I heard one of them look out in the ocean and say, "Is that a shark?" And then I heard him say it again, something about a shark. And so I kind of picked my head up and looked out into the ocean. And I saw these two big, black fins.

• 36:37Speaker 12

  He pointed a fin out, and then all the kids were watching. And we didn't really know what was happening totally.

• 36:45Speaker 10

  Before I realized, those are orca fins.

• 36:48Speaker 09

  It was a whole pot of orcas.

• 36:50Speaker 10

  Come over here and look, everybody.

• 36:53Speaker 12

  One kind of jumped up. We saw like its back and stuff.

• 37:00Speaker 07

  We all started looking at the orcas, started taking like videos. We never see orcas that people.

• 37:04Speaker 10

  I started taking pictures and videos.

• 37:07Speaker 06

  Kids got excited, and then we're all kind of going over there. And then sure enough.

• 37:11Speaker 10

  Sure enough, everybody just started moving closer to the sea. And every time we would see a fin or action, there'd be communal gasps of emotion.

• 37:35Speaker 10

  We just kept moving closer and closer. My class kind of found ourselves in this triangle of sand with the incoming tide.

• 37:44Speaker 06

  And they're in the water, and they're pretty close. And they're circling around, and the water's getting all churned up.

• 37:51Speaker 10

  So I was kind of just keeping an eye on the kids, but kind of focused on what is happening out there in the ocean.

• 37:58Speaker 11

  We saw fins and their blowholes. Yeah. Shooting water up.

• 38:03Speaker 10

  I was just becoming like, almost, you know, euphoric in how incredible it was.

• 38:17Speaker 06

  To see the orcas come up, and their flukes smack the water and all of that, it's really exciting.

• 38:22Speaker 10

  Why do we keep on seeing orcas surfacing, breaching the surface from all different angles?

• 38:32Speaker 09

  And then I saw like 5 fins just circling in this one area. And then I saw actually like the hump of something like a little bit bigger.

• 38:46Speaker 10

  And I swear, I saw like a big whale tail, and a big whale kind of like turn over. And I'm just trying to understand, why is this happening? What is happening here? Oh my gosh.

• 39:03Speaker 06

  Then I saw the back of a whale that was not a orca whale. And I was like, oh no, this is hunting grounds.

• 39:16Speaker 07

  The little kids don't know what's going on.

• 39:18Speaker 06

  The older kids kind of were like, this, okay, something really serious is happening.

• 39:22Speaker 08

  Then Atticus had said that they were attacking the whales.

• 39:26Speaker 09

  Are those orcas like attacking a whale?

• 39:28Speaker 08

  And then we realized that they were.

• 39:31Speaker 07

  They were biting.

• 39:31Speaker 12

  Yeah, you could see there was a little blood in the water. They're actually like totally trying to kill these whales.

• 39:38Speaker 11

  There was a baby and a mother.

• 39:40Speaker 06

  The mom, she comes in, and she kind of goes into where they're like circling this calf. And then the calf is able to kind of swim away, but it's going towards shore.

• 39:54Speaker 10

  A mama whale and a baby whale are like coming in. And they're coming in seemingly pretty fast.

• 40:02Speaker 07

  They were like where a surfer would be surfing.

• 40:04Speaker 09

  The surf just takes it all the way in.

• 40:08Speaker 10

  They're, they're coming in too far.

• 40:11Speaker 07

  We saw the mom whale first, and she like washed up.

• 40:14Speaker 06

  Oh my gosh, is this baby and this poor mom going to get beached? And we're going to have 2 casualties of this poor scared baby and this mom doing everything she can.

• 40:28Speaker 11

  And the mother was flapping its tail to get off the beach.

• 40:34Speaker 10

  It didn't happen at first, but after a couple of opportunities, she actually did make it successfully out.

• 40:42Speaker 09

  We start to move down the beach.

• 40:45Speaker 10

  Why don't we all walk down to the other side of the rock? We can see better.

• 40:51Speaker 06

  We need to get on the other side. We need to get to higher ground. So everybody got to higher ground.

• 40:56Speaker 10

  And that kind of put us right in front of this, this baby calf that was, again, just kind of stuck, kind of struggling on the sandy beach.

• 41:07Speaker 06

  And the tide is coming in. And so these kids are like, oh, my gosh, we like, let's run towards the water and towards the whale. And we're like, no, get back, get back.

• 41:15Speaker 11

  The baby was still on there and it did have a bite in its fin.

• 41:21Speaker 08

  Every time the waves came and hit the whale.

• 41:23Speaker 07

  You would see like a gush of blood come out with the wave. And it was a lot of blood. It was bleeding out.

• 41:31Speaker 09

  Then it would go like still for a little bit.

• 41:34Speaker 07

  I was like, that's really sad. And I was just processing it. And also the tide was coming in. So I was just trying to get away from the tide and process it at the same time.

• 41:43Speaker 10

  Around that time, I looked up and I saw that the other teachers had their classes kind of up by the trail where we came down to the beach. And from there, I kind of looked around at my class and noticed that like half of my third grade class was bawling tears.

• 42:03Speaker 08

  Like the third graders, they were all like super sad.

• 42:06Speaker 12

  A wave of kids that were just all crying.

• 42:09Speaker 13

  I was crying a little bit. I felt really scared.

• 42:12Speaker 12

  That's when they kind of realized it's not just like gonna get out and it's not gonna be just okay.

• 42:18Speaker 13

  I wanted to go in the ocean and push the baby whale right back out to sea.

• 42:28Speaker 10

  It felt so surreal. And I was just put in this position as a teacher where I didn't know what the best move was.

• 42:40Speaker 10

  People were shouting out different ideas about how to help it. We should help it. Call 911.

• 42:46Speaker 06

  Mrs. Cunningham, we, we gotta do something about it. And I'm like, I'm trying. I'm calling. I got on my phone and I Googled the North Coast like animal, it's a care center. And so I left a message. And then some of my students were like, did you get through to somebody? Did you get through? I'm like, I left a message. I'm leaving another one.

• 43:07Speaker 10

  There was crying and screaming and arguments. It's really, really gnarly and scary and traumatic. But at the same time, there was a realness of, you know, this, this happens. This is what happens. There was nothing we could do to help the baby at that point. I realized we just, we just need to kind of exit this, this scene.

• 43:32Speaker 06

  I called one more time, just to make sure when it was kind of a little bit more calm and we're walking towards school, left another message.

• 43:42Speaker 14

  I got the call that we had an emergency and that there was a, a baby whale washed up on the beach. And so immediately knew that we needed to mobilize. I'm Jessica Gravel. I'm the Marine Program Manager for Trinidad Rancheria. Our entire Natural Resources Department really quickly.

• 43:58Speaker 15

  Reached out to each other and all jumped in the van and got down to the beach as soon as we could.

• 44:05Speaker 16

  It was pretty far down the beach, probably like a half a mile.

• 44:07Speaker 15

  There were probably 50 people on the beach.

• 44:15Speaker 14

  Your first instinct when you see that is like, oh, we can just, you know, push it back in the water. Like it's, it needs help, obviously. And we saw that there were some other injuries to the other pectoral fin.

• 44:26Speaker 17

  And that really scared me for it.

• 44:28Speaker 14

  Even with that injury, it was important to maintain distance and very early, like monitoring and crowd control was the priority.

• 44:38Speaker 16

  There was one gentleman that started throwing rocks. The law enforcement folks ran over and shoot him away.

• 44:47Speaker 15

  And so we started collecting the little bits of information.

• 44:50Speaker 17

  What is the danger to a whale to not being in the water? When they are on shore, their bodies do start to feel that weight that they're not normally used to. In prolonged situations and when an animal isn't well, that can, can be very bad and essentially fatal.

• 45:08Speaker 17

  We determined this was likely a yearling or an older calf.

• 45:13Speaker 14

  There was some pretty evident scarring on the body of the whale.

• 45:19Speaker 17

  Rake marks are the sort of distance of the orca teeth.

• 45:22Speaker 14

  There was one moment when it put up its tail and kind of smacked it down on the beach and caused it to splash.

• 45:33Speaker 15

  We had been together on the beach for a couple hours.

• 45:37Speaker 16

  We knew that there was an incoming tide coming.

• 45:39Speaker 14

  At one point, it had kind of been able to turn its body so that its nose was pointing to the ocean.

• 45:46Speaker 15

  It made a couple somersaults towards the water. The whole crowd had it kind of this collective, it's gonna succeed.

• 45:55Speaker 16

  You can do it. You can do it. Another set comes in. She'd make a little bit more progress to the point to where finally we were cheering. Okay, she's free. She was gone.

• 46:09Speaker 15

  To finally see the whale swim back to sea was the kind of fairy tale ending I didn't know was going to be there that day.

• 46:21Speaker 10

  Yeah, the fairy tale ending is, is tough to see sometimes.

• 46:27Speaker 09

  We were just like all still in shock, thinking like, was that real?

• 46:32Speaker 10

  And then Scarlett, our counselor, popped her head in and they saw the baby whale swim back out into the ocean.

• 46:42Speaker 09

  Okay, the baby whale is okay, everybody.

• 46:46Speaker 17

  The whale lived.

• 46:48Speaker 07

  Started like cheering.

• 46:49Speaker 09

  Yeah, let's go.

• 46:52Speaker 10

  And the kids had a great, you know, cheer of joy.

• 46:58Speaker 13

  I would say I've never felt that emotion before. And it's just a once in a lifetime experience.

• 47:12Speaker 11

  Whenever someone mentions a whale, I will probably remember that baby whale.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  Later that day, a Coast Guard helicopter flew over Trinidad Bay.

• 47:22Speaker 17

  I called the air station and I was like, hey, can you guys do one more pass and maybe just see if you see anything? They came back and did another pass. And they did actually see multiple whales and they did a flyover back in the area that we were and kind of gave us a wave at the very end too. That was pretty fun.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Special thanks to Trinidad's elementary seventh grade class.

• 47:48Speaker 06

  My name is Alana.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Xavier.

• 47:50Speaker 06

  Jelena.

• 47:51Speaker 09

  Joda. Atticus.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  Third grade class.

• 47:54Speaker 06

  Remy. Harriet.

• 47:55Speaker 09

  Emmett Bowman.

• 47:56Speaker 17

  Marjorie Cunningham.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  Marine Mammal Stranding Network at Cal Poly Humboldt.

• 48:00Speaker 17

  Allison Louie. Dr. Don Golay.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  And the Trinidad Rancheria.

• 48:04Speaker 14

  Bronson Berg. Jessica Ening. Jessica Gravel. Selena Rowan.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  This piece was produced by Atticus's mom, Zuki Lewis.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  Snap us if you missed even a moment. Know that the entire world of Snap storytelling awaits. KQED in San Francisco is Snap's Orbiting Hall of Justice and Big News. At long last, if you need more, you want more, more journeys, more secrets, Snap Plus is now available. Subscribe for bonus Snap episodes, special Snap meetups and more. Snap Plus, snapjudgment.org. On Team Snap, the union represented producers, artists, editors and engineers are members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIO, Local 51.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  Robots and people playing as robots. Please note that no Snap Studios content may be used for training, testing or developing machine learning or AI systems without prior written permission. Snap is brought to you by the team that refuses to use any perfume or soaps made from whales. Except for the Uber producer, Mr. Mark Rissich, who unfortunately doesn't use any soaps or perfumes whatsoever. There's Nancy Lopez, Pat Mercedes Miller, Anna Sussman, Renzo Gorio, John Faseal, Shayna Shealy, Taylor Decot, Flo Wiley, Bo Walsh,

• 49:38Speaker 01

  Marissa Dodge. And this is not the news. No way it's the news. In fact, you call BS on your own seventh grader when he tells you, hey dad, the blue whale by mass is the biggest creature to ever live, bigger than the biggest dinosaur. No way, kid. Get off the TikTok or whatever. Then check to discover the little bugger is right. And you'd still, still not be as far away from the news as this is. But this is PRX.