Baleen Wolfkiller: Fact or Fiction?

The CSI:NY wolfkiller

Every once in a while I get a spike in traffic to the site from people searching "Baleen Wolfkiller".  It took me a while to figure out what was going on, but it turns out that a baleen wolfkiller was the murder weapon in an episode of CSI:NY (season 5,epsiode 19).  There's a good synopsis of the episode here. One of the scientists found descriptions of the device by doing an online search.  The information and websites that she visits are fictional, but baleen wolfkillers are real artifacts.

Background:

The CSIs found this (pretend) website

I watched the episode and it looked more or less accurate - the baleen looked like baleen and the way it was folded looked like the ethnographic examples of wolfkillers that I've seen in photos.  The Native American tribe in the show was fictional and for the sake of the story they moved the artifact from the arctic to Manhattan.  The only baleen wolfkillers that I'm aware of come from the Western Arctic between Alaska and the Northwest Territories, but if someone knows of their use elsewhere I'd be interested in hearing about it.

Fort Anderson Baleen Wolfkiller

Using humpback whale baleen from a whale that was found beached near St. John's last summer, I made two wolfkillers to test - one based on the CSI:NY example and one based on an ethnographically collected specimen from Fort Anderson and illustrated in the Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 5, Arctic.  I wanted to see if the artifacts perform the way they do in books and on tv.  The two examples that I reproduced for the experiment differ significantly in size; the Fort Anderson wolfkiller is 31 cm long and is folded up into a package 7cm long.  The CSI:NY wolfkiller is much smaller, about 12 cm long and folded into a 3 cm long package.  Presumably the creators of the show needed to make a small version of the device that could be swallowed by an unaware human victim. 

CSI:NY experimental wolfkiller

Aside from the size, the most significant difference was the binding material.  In the ethnographic example, the binding was removed prior to use and the unbound baleen was wrapped up in bait meat, fat or fish.  In the tv show, the detectives speculated that the wolfkiller was hidden in an oyster and swallowed with the binding in place.  They said that the lashing  used was catgut, but the thread that they showed was much finer than the catgut that I'm familiar with - it looked more like sinew, so I used sinew in the experiment.

Methodology:

The materials used

To simulate stomach acid, I make a weak hydrochloric acid solution using muriatic acid in a ratio of 1 part muriatic acid to 60 parts water.  Stomach acid has a pH between 1 and 2.  I wanted a transparent, tough material to simulate the intestine, so I used a condom.  For the experiment I used two Lifestyles ultrathin condoms - one for each wolfkiller.  References that I've seen indicate that it typically takes 24 to 72 hours for food to pass through a humans digestive tract, so I was prepared to let the experiment run for up to 72 hours.

Folded and unfolded wolfkiller

I prepared the wolfkillers ahead of time by cutting 1 cm strips of baleen from a humpback baleen plate using a scroll saw.  Using files and sandpaper, I sharpened both ends of each strip to match the ethnographic and CSI:NY examples.  I boiled them for about an hour to soften them in order to fan fold them into shape.  While they were still flexible, I tightly tied them in the middle with sinew.  I didn't make any knots in the sinew, I just smoothed it down on itself and set them aside to dry for 12-24 hours.

Wolfkiller in condom in warm water

When they were dry, I removed the binding around the Fort Anderson reproduction and left the sinew on the smaller CSI:NY wolfkiller.  I put them in the condoms and poured in the acid.  I tied a stone weight to the reservoir tip of the condom and tied the other end to a chopstick and suspended the whole thing in a big jug of warm water.  I kept replacing the water throughout the experiment to simulate a warm body environment.  After the first 'wet' test with the Fort Anderson wolfkiller I reboiled it, set it, dried it and unwrapped it to create a dry control test to compare the 'wet' results against.

Results:
Fort Anderson Baleen Wolfkiller, Wet Test:

• 0 hrs 0 mins: Placed it in the acid solution in the condom, no expansion, free floating.
• 0 hrs 28 mins: It expanded and began pressing on the interior walls of the condom.
• 1 hrs 0 mins: It expanded and lodged in place. Impossible to move forward or backward without catching and tearing the condom
• 7 hrs 10 mins: It punctured the condom. Experiment finished.

Fort Anderson Wolfkiller at 0 hrs, 0 mins

Fort Anderson Wolfkiller at 0hrs, 28 mins - first contact

Fort Anderson Wolfkiller - pressure leading up to the puncture

Fort Anderson Wolfkiller - Immediately after puncturing the condom

CSI: NY Baleen Wolfkiller, Wet Test:

• 0 hrs 0 mins: Placed it in the acid solution in the condom, no expansion, free floating.
• 3 hrs 50 mins: The sinew binding began to loosen and unravel.
• 52 hrs 0 mins: The sinew binding let loose and the baleen expanded and applied pressure to the interior wall of the condom.
• 52 hrs 50 mins: The Baleen elongated inside the length of the condom. No longer possible to catch or tear. Experiment Finished.

CSY:NY wolfkiller - it looked like this for the first 52 hours

CSI:NY wolfkiller - 52 hrs, 0 mins - the sinew binding finally released

CSI:NY Wolfkiller - 52hrs, 50 mins - aligned in the condom, no more chance to puncture

Fort Anderson Baleen Wolfkiller, Dry Test:

• 0 hrs 0 mins: The sinew wrapping is removed. Very slight expansion as the tension is removed.
• 7 hrs 10 mins: Slightly expanded.
• 20 hrs 50 mins: It contracted tightly. Observed in the early morning after a cool, damp night.
• 24 hrs 0 mins: Still tightly contracted. Experiment finished.

Fort Anderson and CSI:NY Wolfkillers bound up to dry

Fort Anderson Wolfkiller - 0 hrs, 0 mins - holds its shape after the lashing is removed

Fort Anderson Wolfkiller - 7 hrs, 10 mins - slight expansion at the same time it was fully extended in the wet experiment

Fort Anderson Wolfkiller - 24hrs, 0mins - it contracted on its own again after a cold damp night

Conclusions:

It worked!

The Fort Anderson baleen wolfkiller absolutely worked.  The ethnographic description seems completely plausible and accurate in all regards.  In a colder environment, the baleen could be frozen inside the meaty bait and be held stiffly in shape until the wolf swallowed it and it began to thaw out in the stomach.  As the dry test shows, a cool, humid environment actually causes an unbound baleen wolfkiller to contract tightly.  Baleen is keratin, like our fingernails and hair.  Seeing the tightly contracted baleen this morning made me wonder what kind of hair day my curly-haired friends are having.  By contrast, the warm, wet, acidic environment inside an animals digestive tract releases that tension and the baleen slowly begins to return to its original, straight shape.  The points on either end would snag and tear any soft tissue that it encountered.  In the test, this fatal puncture, which would lead to the spilling of the contents of the digestive tract into the stomach cavity and weakening and ultimately death by sepsis, happened after 7 hours and 10 minutes.  The movement of the animal and contractions of the digestive tract would only accelerate the internal damage done.

The CSI:NY wolfkiller partially worked.  It took a long time for the sinew binding to let go and when it did, it didn't actually do any damage to the short section of intestine that the condom represented in the experiment. In the tv show, the sinew thread sizzles and pops off when the wolfkiller is submerged in acid. But that didn't happen in this experiment.  Its likely that the mechanical action of digestion and the friction with other food particles would work the thread loose more quickly, but as the dry test demonstrates, the binding is not necessary for the folded baleen to hold its shape.  Swallowing the wolfkiller is like swallowing a bomb that is set to go off.  The binding could act as a fuse, with a longer thread and more lashings acting to delay the expansion of the device, but at the risk of the whole package passing harmlessly through the victims body without ever detonating.

Extracting the wolfkiller, CSI:NY

In this experiment, the binding didn't release until 52 hours had passed.  If it would have come loose in less than 24 hours, then it would have certainly still been inside the victim, but every hour after that increases the chance that it will have worked its way through the digestive tract and been excreted with no damage done.  Still, the device did open, became briefly lodged and then loosened to float farther down the intestine to snag and potentially tear again, which is consistent with the damage done to the victim in the tv show.   On CSI:NY the wolfkiller tumbled down the small intestine creating a series of punctures as it descended before lodging in the colon.  On the other hand, the larger Fort Anderson wolfkiller would lodge high in the digestive track soon after it was swallowed,and the expansion begins so quickly that it might not even leave the stomach before extending.

Small, but not that small.

Aside from the liberties taken with the cultural and geographic origin of the device, the only real strike against the CSI:NY version of the wolfkiller is the idea that somebody could be tricked into swallowing something that size and not realize it.  In the show, it was hidden in an oyster and gulped down in one go.  Maybe.  Even the small wolfkiller is about the size of a pen lid.  I'm not sure if someone could swallow a pen lid and not realize it.  A wolf could gulp down one of these things without caring or realizing whats going on, but as a murder weapon it seems pretty likely that the victim would notice.  But if they did swallow it and the binding did release before they passed it - ouch.

Photo Credits:
1,2,4, 21: Screen captures from CSI NY: The Complete Fifth Season
3: Figure from Handbook of North American Indians Volume 5 Arctic
5-20, 22: Tim Rast