Boiling the Hooded Seal Bones

Eliza and her seal

Wow, what an exhausting weekend.  I spent two full days helping Eliza Brandy cut, boil, and threaten the meat off the hooded seal skeleton.  It was a lot of fun and I learned all kinds of weird and wonderful things about seal anatomy, but it was a very big job.  Despite the cool temperatures and drizzly weather, we had a small army of volunteers help out on Saturday and Lori came by for the full day on Sunday.

A bloody good time!

At the start of Saturday morning, the seal carcass was stored in sections in four big rubbermaid tubs.  The skin was off everything (except the skull and flippers) and the organs were removed, but all the meat and bones were still there.

Soaking the bones

By Sunday evening all the meat was boiled off the bones, with the exception of one or two of the flippers, and the boiled bones were sitting in the lab in detergent solutions for the next stage in the cleaning and degreasing. Ultimately the bones will be clean and white and part of the faunal collection in the Archaeology Department at Memorial University, with the exception of the skull which is going to the Biology Department and a few of the teeth which are going back to the Department of Fisheries and Ocean's to help age the animal.

A boiled femur - they're tiny!

Saturday was a pretty bloody day.  The meat had a very odd consistency.  It didn't really hold together the way beef or chicken does, you could pull it apart with your fingers.  It was like short fibres packed together, maybe a little like an artificial fire log, but wet.  One of the students, Andrew, said it reminded him of fibreglass putty.  After the meat was boiled, it turned a rich brown colour and acted a lot like clay.  You could smoosh it and smear it around with your fingers like greasy mud.  Maybe that's why Amy, who studies ceramics, was so good at cleaning around all the nooks and crannies on the vertebrae.

Hooded seal eyeball - they're huge!

Sorry the pictures are so graphic, but there were some really interesting anatomical details that I think are worth sharing.  The seal's eyes for example, were huge.  Each one was the size of a jelly-filled billiard ball.  Beneath the webbed skin, the front flipper was a lot like a human limb, with short 'arm' bones and very long, flat finger bones.

Hind flipper - a foot evolved into a paddle

But the hind flippers were pretty extraordinary, with tiny short femurs, the size of a bow-tie, and long spidery toes. The most interesting thing about the hind flipper was that the outside toes were about twice the length of the middle toe, making two powerful V-shaped paddles.  In the photo on the left, you can see the five sharp little toe-nails at the end of each digit.

Distal phalange and nail

Cleaned up, those toe bones were pretty weird looking too.  Compared to other animals, all of the limb bones were flattened and the last phalange of each finger and toe have complex little cones to hold the long sharp claws.  With enough boiling the claws came loose and slid off the bone. 

By Saturday evening we had the bulk of the meat removed and all of the bones had at least started to boil.   Sunday was a much cleaner day because we were dealing with cooked meat and gristle, not blood and skin and tendons.  We started the pots boiling in the morning and spent a couple hours working on the sealskin, which I'll talk about in more detail next time.

It looks so tidy in a picture

The goal on Sunday was to get every bone this clean

Ultimately, the skeleton will end up here.

This was a huge job, and its still not really over yet.  Eliza has a bit more boiling to do on one or two flippers and there will still be a few weeks of soaking to get rid of the final bits of tissue and grease still on the bones.  Maybe I can get her to describe the process when its all done. I'll try and get some more photos when everything is finally finished and stored with the rest of MUN's Archaeology bone collection.

Cheeky gull with something from the seal

Postscript:
We were greeted almost immediately by a gull on Sunday morning.  He had one bad leg and a pretty brazen attitude.  He wound up grabbing something out of one of the bags and took off with it.  We didn't see which bag he raided - so it could have been a rib or a piece of cartilage.  If it was a rib, Eliza wanted it back, so we took off after him.  He was accosted by a group of 4 crows along the way and we hoped that the piece would be lost in the skirmish, but he held onto it.  We decided to try rushing him the next time he set it down, but that didn't work, he just picked it up again before he flew away.  He flew straight into the middle of the pond and dropped it in the water, before coming back throughout the day to see what else he could steal.

Is Eliza dejected or plotting revenge in the last photo?

 Photo Credits:
1, 3, 7-10: Tim Rast
 2: Corey Hutchings
4,6: Elaine Anton
5: Amy St John
11,12: Lori White

Preparing Seal Parts to Dry

Then things got weird

When I wrote last Friday that this past weekend would be a big change of theme for Elfshot, I meant I'd be switching to wholesale jewelry production, not that I'd be hanging up 85 feet of inflated seal intestines in my workshop to dry.

I missed some of the fun on Monday morning, so here's Lori's take to fill in the gaps between the DFO necropsy on the hooded seal and the backyard:

The soft parts of the seal in tubs

It was impossible to find an archaeologist with a pickup to help out with transport so my dad came to the rescue. He arrived the minute we finished packing up the seal and all the totes waiting in the loading bay. Dad likes to keep his truck in pristine condition (as you might remember) so I was thrilled he agreed to take on this potentially messy deed. He arrived with a tarp spread out over the box floor so all he had to do was back ‘er up to the loading bay and Eliza and I loaded the totes on board. Dad was also instrumental in getting the skeletal parts to MUN and into Eliza’s lab freezer, and later the sealskin and I back to my house. Of course, it didn’t hurt that he stuck around and allowed me to sit in his truck for a half hour while we waited for Tim to return from the wholesale show... in all my seal necropsy excitement I had gone off and forgotten my keys... No, this apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. A BIG THANK YOU TO DAD. XO

Cutting off sheets of fat

I did a bit more work on the cleaning the fat off the hide. The fat was still an inch or more thick in many places so it was still too early to start scraping. Officially, the fat layer was measured at 4.5 cm thick, but there were spots that were at least 6 or 7 cm thick. I was cutting off the fat in sheets. The word "gobbet" kept coming to mind as the smaller chunks of fat plopped into the blubber bucket. I'll try to figure out a way to weigh the fat today. I can't lift the container anymore.

Arm through left flipper hole

I'm still a novice when it comes to judging where the hide will be while cutting through the fat, so I found it safest to run my left hand along the outside of the hide while cutting with the knife on the inside. That way I could apply constant pressure to the skin and judge the thickness of the fat. In the photo on the left, my arm is through the hole where the seal's left front flipper was cut out. The hole around the right flipper tore and is the ragged edge on the bottom of the skin. The other small holes and nicks in the hide are accidental cuts from the skinning and blubber removal. Those holes won't matter much in the end, because I plan to cut the hide into a long thong about 3/4 of an inch wide.

The speckled pattern in the hide

I finally got a 1/4 or so of the hide down to the skin and it feels like when the whole hide is down to that level I can start scraping. That will probably be later today. The hide is spotty on the inside, so in the photo you can pretty clearly see that part of the pelt that is clean down to the skin and ready to be scraped.

Cutting the webbing around the intestines

We spent about half the day yesterday cleaning the intestines and bladder. Squeezing out the intestine contents was pretty gross; there were flaky bits coming out of the end attached to the stomach and baby-poo yellow paste coming out the opposite end. The 85 feet of intestine were sampled during the necropsy, so it was cut into three sections. There is a connector webbing that pulls the intestines into a coiled mass and that needed to be cut in dozens of places in order to stretch them out straight.

Tying off the inflated intestine

After I squeezed out each section and ran water through them we inflated them with a mattress pump so that they can dry. We hung the inflated tubes up in my workshop to dry. On the best of days, my job is a little unusual, but stringing those rubbery tubes up in the shed was weird even for me.

I'll be sitting under this all spring

I don't have an immediate plan for the intestines, but once they are dried out they will make a tough, lightweight, waterproof, translucent kind of parchment. They were used in the Arctic for windows in snow houses and waterproof clothing. There are some beautiful, light weight anoraks made from strips of intestine sewn together. Check out this site, Seal Gut Raincoats, for more info.

Hooded Seal Bladder

Finally, we inflated the bladder and hung it up to dry. The bladder was cool - the sphincter muscle is still springy and strong enough that when you pump it up it closes tightly enough that it holds the air in. Its like a balloon that seals itself when you inflate it. These things were used for floats on harpoons and water containers.

Photo Credits:
1-4,6-8: Lori White
5, 9: Tim Rast