Baleen Plates

This is a section of baleen plates from a beached humpback whale.  These plates are about 2 feet long, but on some species of whales they can grow 5 or 6 times that length.

I pull off one plate at a time as I need them for reproductions.

Photo Credit: Tim Rast

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

Palaeoeskimo Skin Processing Experiments

Sinew and Baleen hafted scrapers

I started using the stone endscrapers on the hooded seal skin first thing yesterday morning. In general, I wanted to get a feel for using chert endscrapers to clean a skin, and specifically I wanted to test the durability of sinew versus baleen hafting material. I had one endscraper hafted in a wood handle with sinew and hide glue and a second hafted with baleen and hide glue.

The used sinew hafted scraper

The sinew scraper became loose in the handle after 23 minutes of scraping. The lashings started to soften and the scraper started to wiggle like a loose tooth, although after another 8 minutes of scraping (31 minutes total) it was still secure enough to continue working. The lashings became slightly more flexible, but it really didn't impede the function of the tool.

The oil saturated baleen hafted endscraper

The baleen hafted scraper became loose after 49 minutes of scraping. It lasted more than twice as long as the sinew hafted scraper and after another 10 minutes of scraping (59 minutes total) it was still working. The hard socket formed by the baleen has still not become flexible, as the sinew haft did, and although the glue was no longer holding it in place the haft was still as firm after an hour of scraping as it was at the beginning. Unlike the sinew hafting, where the binding material itself started to become flexible after 23 minutes, it was the glue alone in the baleen haft that was undone by the greasy work after 49 minutes. The baleen socket is still rock solid after almost a full hour of messy greasy scraping.

Scraping with the Palaeoeskimo reproduction endscraper

Regluing the scrapers using seal blood

Since both scrapers popped out of their bindings so neatly, I cleaned them up at the end of the day and reglued them using some of the seal blood, yet another cool traditional use for seals. Lori collected some of the blood from directly out of the seal's heart at the necropsy. Its really sticky - in fact, when you are eating uncooked seal you have to be careful not to glue your teeth together!

The fat and hide

Sinew vs. baleen was the specific question that I wanted to look at, but in general terms, I realized that chert endscrapers are still a bit of a precission tool for the stage of skin working that this pelt is at. I've cut off the thick layer of fat, which weighed in at whopping 125 pounds! Think about that for a minute, that's just the fat that was clinging to the hide when the seal was skinned. One hundred and twenty-five pounds is the equivelant of one whole 105 pound Pamela Anderson PLUS a 20 pound bucket of lard.

Slate ulu pressing out the grease

But the fat and connective tissues that are still clinging to the underside of the skin are saturated in grease and the sharp edged scraper can't start actually scraping until after that grease is removed. Most of what I did with the little endscrapers was squeegeeing out the grease from the skin. I briefly tried a metal ulu and the wider blade did wonders - where the endscrapers were removing the grease a tablespoonful at a time, the ulu was pressing it out by the cupful.

I took a break and did some more reading. Priscilla Renouf and Trevor Bell wrote a paper outlining Dorset Palaeoeskimo Skin Processing at Phillip's Garden, Port au Choix, Northwestern Newfoundland. In it, they identified a set of slate artifacts called tabular scrapers that look to be designed specifically for degreasing hides. I didn't have any of the tabular slate scrapers made up ahead of time but after spending a couple hours pressing out the grease from the hide using the little chert endscraper they seemed like a pretty good idea.

Rough, unhafted tabular slate scraper

I made a rough, unhafted version of the bevelled-edged tabular scraper and tried it alongside a slate ulu reproduction that I found in a box in the basement. It worked great. I probably could have accomplished in 15 or 20 minutes with the tabular scraper what it took me an hour and a half to do with the endscrapers. Next time I clean a skin though, I'll make one with a handle. This is the only tool that tired out my hand from having to pinch it between my fingers.

Degreasing with the tabular scraper

Degreasing with the slate ulu

Next to the metal ulu, the ground slate ulu and tabular scraper were the best suited to degreasing the skin. You can press a wide swath and the grease pours out of the skin. In some ways, I even preferred the slate ulu to the metal knives and I wish that I would have started using it sooner.

Shiny happy ulu

The sharp slate is just as effective in slicing through the the fat layer as the metal knives, but the skin is a bit more of a barrier. Its like cutting with safety scissors - the material that you want it to cut is easy to slice, but the skin that you don't want to damage offers enough resistance that you don't have to worry as much about slips.

End of the first degreasing

At the end of the day the hide is still heavy with grease, but its starting to look much more even and there are dry patches forming. I'm debating now when to cut it into the thong and what to do about the hair. I was kind of hoping that the seal would have been a little more decomposed and the hair would want to fall out on its own, but as it stands now, I'll either have to induce some decomposition to get the hair to fall out or shave it off.

The tools used so far

Shaving the hair seems like the safer, although more labour intensive, option - I'm worried that if the pelt starts to putrefy enough for the hair to fall out that I may not be able to stop the rot before it damages the skin. I also think that the neighbours (and Lori) have been through enough without me intentionally rotting sealskin in the backyard.

Photo Credits:
1, 5-7, 9-14: Tim Rast
2-4 & Video: Lori White
8: From Renouf and Bell 2008

Baleen Braces for the Tuktut Nogait Bow

I posted some photos of the Tuktut Nogait reproduction bow on a forum dedicated to recreating ancient technology, called Palaeoplanet. The feedback there was very useful. One question was whether or not there were any splints or braces under the lashing on the bend in the limb. There wasn't, but there should have been, so I added some. They don't change the appearance of the bow, but they make a marked difference in performance.

The original bow was in two pieces with a splice in one limb, so I assumed that there would be lashing at that point, and possibly a brace piece, although no additional bow parts were found with the Tuktut Nogait bow. The bow is flat across the back and most of the limb has a curved belly, creating a D-shaped cross section, except at the knee in the limb, where the splice would be lashed onto the rest of the limb. At that point the limb has a rectangular cross section for about 4 inches, which is the area that I wrapped the lashings around. The same spot on the complete limb had a similar rectangular cross section, which seemed to mark the position of the tight lashing. I added the lashings thinking that it might help strengthen the limb, but also so that the bow would look more like I imagined the original would have looked.

However, from a bow making perspective, that is just adding useless weight to the limb for no reason. I dug a bit more and found some excellent analogs for the Tuktut Nogait bow in Karen McCullough's The Ruin Islanders. These bows are much earlier than I imagined the Tuktut Nogait bow to be, but they are such good matches in the shape of the limbs and nocks that it made me rethink the reproduction I was working on. The Ruin Island bows were found on Ellesmere Island, well above the tree line and a long way from Tuktut Nogait National Park, but there are many similarities. The Ruin Island bows made heavy use of baleen, in fact some of the smaller bows are entirely made from baleen. Others combined wood and baleen, using baleen as brace pieces on the back of the bow in the knees, which is exactly where the bow makers on Palaeoplanet suggested my bow might need reinforcement. If the braces on the Tuktut Nogait bow were originally baleen then differences in preservation might explain why they were not found along with the wood components, even though the wood part of the bow seems designed to fit them.

The baleen braces were quick and easy to make, I just cut ovals out of baleen using the scroll saw and sanded down the edges to a smooth taper around the edge. I boiled them and bent them into a slight curve that would fit the recurve of the bow and lashed them into place. Interestingly, the 71 feet of braided sinew that I've been using for the cable fit perfectly this time. Every other time that I've wrapped the cable I had 18-24 inches left over. I thought that the cord might be stretching when I wrapped it, but I measured it again this time and its still 71 feet long. I also weighed everything while it was apart.

Here are the specs:

• Wood, yew (50"): 223 g
• Braided sinew, (71'): 104 g
• Baleen braces, (4 1/2"): 10 g x 2
• Sinew bowstring, 2-ply, (49"): 12 g
• Sealskin cable lashing on grip (18"): 3 g

• Total Weight: 362 g

I lashed the baleen in place as firmly as I could and restrung the cable very tightly. The bow has settled back into its usual shape, but at first it was almost braced backwards from the tension in the cable. I haven't been able to shoot it yet, because the snow around here is too deep right now and I'd lose the arrows, but I like how it feels with the braces and tighter cable. The knees of the limbs no longer feel like the weakest point in the limb, they feel like the strongest. The draw weight of the bow also shot up. It now draws about 34 pounds at 24" without any twists in the cable - which was the draw weight of the bow without braces after 3 cable twists (the lines overlap in the graph below). Now, with two twists in the cable, it has a draw weight of 36 pounds at 24", shown on the graph in orange, which is the highest I've seen yet.

I can't wait for some of this snow to go and try shooting it. Although to be honest, its still tough to draw to 24 inches without the string popping off the nocks. The next time I take the cable off, I'll probably steam and bend the recurves a little more and see if that helps change the string angle a bit.

The Ruin Island bows seem to have had identical nocks to the Tuktut Nogait bow and the angle of the recurve in the complete bows looks to be quite extreme. Incidentally, the house features where the majority of the Ruin Island bows were found were radiocarbon dated between 580 and 1120 years old. These bows have much more in common with the Tuktut Nogait bow than any of the ethnographic bows that I've seen from the area and make me wonder if the Tuktut Nogait bow isn't older than expected.

Photo Credits:
1-4, 7-10: Tim Rast
5,6,11: From The Ruin Islanders by Karen McCullough

Photo Captions:
First: lashing in a baleen brace
Second: Tuktut Nogait bow drawn to 22" with baleen braces in place
Third: Braced bow showing the lashed in baleen
Fourth: Braced bow with baleen in place
Fifth: Ruin Island phase bows
Sixth: Ruin Island baleen brace pieces (middle row and bottom), sinew twisters (top)
Seventh: Baleen braces for the Tuktut Nogait bow
Eighth: The braces in place
Ninth: Tying down the cable - that's tight!
Tenth: Graph of draw weights of the Tuktut Nogait bow with various settings
Eleventh: Ruin Island Phase bow limb fragments