E-Mail This Article to a Friend The dead-seal scrolls (continued)

It’s hard to imagine that the small, cluttered, strange-smelling necropsy room at the New England Aquarium represents the height of luxury, but, for Belinda Rubenstein at least, it does. "It has air-conditioning and heating and ventilation and a roof," she says. "Most of the time you do [the necropsy] right there on the beach." Still, for the uninitiated, the aquarium’s necropsy room does not immediately inspire feelings of contentment. Everywhere you look, in buckets, boxes, and jars, are bits of animals. There are heaps of seal jaws, dolphin skulls, and vertebrae of unspecified origins. There are pickled tissue and blubber preserves. On one countertop, there’s a fist-size eyeball, from a minke whale, whose blue-gray iris seems to follow you around the room. "Pretty cool," Rubenstein says, holding one of the jaws up to the light.

At the far end of the room there’s a large freezer, maybe 10 feet by eight, where the aquarium’s backlog of still-unexamined animals is stored. The freezer is something of a mess, a chaotic jumble of bagged corpses and viscera-filled buckets. At the front of the freezer is a seal, its head protruding from a tear in a black plastic bag. The seal’s eyes are blood-red, staring, and its nose, which has been pressed up against the door, is flattened, like a pig’s snout. "That’s horrible! That’s a horrible sight," says a photographer who is here to record the necropsy. She refuses to take a picture of the freezer’s contents, calling them "the depths of darkness."

Rubenstein, meanwhile, is all business. Today, she is here to take a look at a Class-Three specimen, a young hooded seal that was recently discovered floating off the Beverly coast. She won’t know for sure what happened to the seal until she cuts it open and probes around inside. Before she can do this, she and her assistant, a young student named Lauren Bazinet, have to get the thing onto the examination table, which is no mean feat. "We’re gonna need a towel here!" says Rubenstein, responding to a puddle of blood that has formed beneath the seal. Though it weighs only about 75 pounds, a tenth of the weight of a full-grown hooded seal, Rubenstein and Bazinet struggle a little to get the blood-slick animal onto the table. "He’s feeling a lot more solid than he should," says Rubenstein. "He’s not thawed."

As it turns out, the animal is indeed still a little on the stiff side, frozen into a classic seal pose, its body forming a wide S, its head tilted upward, as if it had died regarding something or someone above it. The vision calls to mind those Save the Seals leaflets, the animal’s wide eyes gazing wistfully into the camera, as if to say, "Please don’t club me." Except this animal doesn’t have any eyes — the seagulls got to it before Rubenstein did. "It’s a male," she says, her hands working around the animal’s tail end. I ask her how she can tell. "Boys have one opening down there," she responds. "Girls have two."

The seal looks healthy enough, well-fed and injury-free, so the cause of its demise is probably some kind of infection, or perhaps stress. With some difficulty, Rubenstein starts to slice open the seal’s belly, revealing an inch or so of blubber and knots of grape-red, watermelon-textured flesh. She digs around inside for a while, eventually producing a penis, which she snips along its length. "Here," she says, handing me the bone that is so coveted among sexually challenged Asian men. The bone, about the size of a pulled wishbone, doesn’t look like much, but on the black market one of these can fetch thousands of dollars. A little higher up, around the sternum, Rubenstein comes across a pocket of syrupy liquid, which may be an infection, or may simply be a pocket of fat. She scrapes a little of the matter into a specimen jar for testing.

The rest of the seal proves to be too frozen-solid for Rubenstein’s scalpel, and she eventually has to abandon the necropsy. There are, however, a couple of other things that need to be looked at. The first is a plastic bag containing a borderline Class-Five specimen — a glossy, slimy slab of seal that looks like an oversized bird embryo and smells like the essence of trash. Next, Rubenstein produces a liver-colored stomach. As she slices the stomach open, dozens of rocks that the seal had consumed spill out onto the table — about 10 pounds in all. "Oh, look," Rubenstein says cheerfully, picking at the mess on the table. "A worm."

BEFORE I LEAVE Rubenstein sifting through the pile of undigested stones, she comes across a fleck of white, no larger than a lentil husk, and perks up at the discovery. It’s an otolith, the ear bone of a fish, which seems an odd thing to get excited about. But this tiny scrap of cartilage, says Rubenstein, will provide her with a clue to what kind of fish the seal had been eating before it died, which may in turn provide insight into how well that species of fish is doing in New England, which may provide insight into what effects pollution and the fishing industry are having on the ocean, which may provide insight, say some, into the prospects of our own survival.

Indeed, while most visitors view a trip to the aquarium as an afternoon of entertainment — with a touch of education thrown in for good measure — those who work behind the scenes often sound as if they’re going about the business of saving the world. "The ocean’s health," says Scott Weber, the aquarium’s head veterinarian, "is a reflection of human health." Biologist Greg Early, who helped develop the aquarium’s rehab and research branches back in the early 1970s, believes that the institution’s necropsies should serve a less grandiose, or at least a less anthropocentric, purpose. "The aquarium is a consumer of wildlife," Early says, "and this is one way to pay them back. You bring animals in for display, you’re utilizing them. This is one way to help make their lives better."

Of course, the animals that come through the aquarium’s necropsy room are beyond having their lives made better. This is certainly true of the half-frozen, half-opened seal rolled on to its side on the room’s steel examination table. It may even be true of the infected seal that lies, shivering slightly, in the aquarium’s trauma room. But then there are the countless seals still swimming off the New England coast — and the handful swooping gracefully through the water in the aquarium’s large outdoor tank, watched by delighted children, some of them with cameras in their hands.

Still, it’s hard not to feel a little sad as I stop by the seal tank. A few of the animals are having a lark with a little floating hoop, racing each other, nudging each other aside, like kids themselves. A small crowd gathers to watch, and the seals peer back through the glass, as interested in us as we are in them. As one of the animals flips the hoop with his nose, it strikes me as particularly dismal that a matter of feet away there is a bewildered, desolate seal suffering not only from its sickness but from the attention of those trying to cure it. Worse yet is that freezer, the seal head poking through a plastic bag, its crimson eyes frozen open, its snout flattened.

No more fun and games for that poor bugger. But such sentimentality is a luxury only the occasional visitor to the aquarium can afford. Rubenstein, while admitting she used to feel sorry for the dead and dying seals in her care, has long since stopped getting emotional about the animals. Which is understandable — this week alone she’ll be performing necropsies on three more dead seals. "It’s an investigation to me now," she says. "I take each one as a puzzle." And Rubenstein’s children are developing a dispassionate streak of their own. This is what happens when your world-view becomes tinged with reality — seal bleeding, seal dying, seal rotting. "Sometimes they’ll come with me when I go out to look at an animal," Rubenstein says. "My two-year-old, when we’re setting out, he’ll say to me, ‘Mommy, is this a dead seal or a live seal?’"

Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com