Leave aside, for a moment, the question of why Ted Cranford wanted to perform a CT scan on the head of a sperm whale and consider instead how he could pull it off. First, of course, he would need a dead whale, preferably a young one that had beached itself on the coast of California near his home. Then he would need a device big enough to scan a 600-pound head. And he would have to figure out how to keep the head preserved until he could set up the scanning machinery.
Finding a whale turned out to be the easy part. One fall day, a newly dead infant sperm whale conveniently appeared on San Gregorio Beach, just south of San Francisco. Cranford was attending a scientific meeting in Bristol, England, at the time, but two friends who are marine-mammal veterinarians knew what he was looking for. They drove up Highway 1 from Santa Cruz, 30 miles to the south, cut through several feet of blubber, muscle, and bone, and scooped up the head with a front-end loader borrowed from a nearby lumber company. Cranford’s friends dumped the head into the back of a pickup truck and drove it to the University of California at Santa Cruz’s Long Marine Laboratory, where they stashed it in a walk-in freezer. Then they sent him an urgent message to come home.
When Cranford began looking for funding to scan his whale head, several scientific agencies politely but firmly turned him down. The data would undoubtedly be of interest, they said, but the head of a sperm whale—even a baby sperm whale—simply could not be scanned.
Courtesy of B. MØhl, M. Wahlberg, and P.T. Madsen, "The Monopulsed Nature of Sperm Whale Clicks," Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 114, vol. 2 (2003): 1143-1154. Printed with permission.
