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The dead-seal scrolls
Each year, thousands of people flock to the New England Aquarium to marvel at the creatures on display. What they don’t see are the animals in the giant freezer out back.
BY CHRIS WRIGHT


When I was 13, I came to Boston for a three-week vacation. I took maybe 50 photographs during my time here — a few of the city’s skyline, two or three of a trip to New York, a couple of the house I stayed at on Martha’s Vineyard. The rest were of the harbor seals in the tank outside the New England Aquarium. I still have them, dozens of snapshots, all pretty much identical — seal swimming, seal floating, seal bobbing. Today, 27 years later, there are still seals swimming and bobbing in a tank outside the aquarium, and there are still kids who stand transfixed by the animals. There is nothing, after all, more adorable than a seal.

Or maybe I should say there is nothing more adorable than a Class-One seal — a seal that is still alive and intact. A seal with its belly carved open, with its guts and heart and lungs exposed, its viscous, black-red blood spilling onto a steel table, a seal like that is decidedly less photogenic. And that’s only a Class-Two — dead, but fresh. The aquarium uses three other classifications for the creatures on its premises: Class-Three is an animal that died recently but at an indeterminate time; Class-Four is an animal that is decomposing; Class-Five is mush. In the aquarium’s storage facilities there are buckets and bags of Class-Fives, enough to fill a bathtub. It is among this foul-smelling slop that the important business of the aquarium takes place.

Last year, 1.3 million visitors flocked to the New England Aquarium to ooh at the rock-hopping penguins and aah at the sea otters. Yet there’s a lot more to this operation than immediately meets the eye. Out of an annual operating budget of about $34 million, a little over $3 million is devoted to research and rehabilitation projects. The aquarium, for instance, has about 20 scientists engaged in various studies around the world — probing coral reefs in the South Pacific, rummaging through rivers in Africa. As aquarium spokesman Tony LaCasse puts it, "We’re more than just a giant fish bowl."

The majority of the aquarium’s behind-the-scenes work, however, takes place right here in Boston. Below the exhibit halls, in what one employee calls the "bowels" of the building, is a mini trauma center, where a team of veterinarians tends to the hundreds of sick and injured sea animals that, in any given year, are brought in by the aquarium’s network of volunteers. Then there are the animals that, for somewhat mysterious reasons, strand themselves on the beaches of Cape Cod — an area that has the second-highest concentration of sea-animal strandings in the world. "From November through February," says LaCasse, "we are packed to the gills with sea turtles, literally in every corner."

On a recent Monday morning, a few turtles paddle about in a small tank at the aquarium’s medical center. Nearby, a juvenile gray seal — a little under a year old, a few feet long — lies beside a plastic kiddie pool. The seal is in bad shape, its face a mass of lacerations, its breathing labored and shallow, its little flipper-tail curled in on itself in a silent demonstration of pain. It’s unclear what happened to the seal, but it has a bacterial infection, which is probably treatable, and maybe an inner-ear infection, which probably isn’t. The odds of the animal reaching the status of a Class-Two specimen are, right now, about 50-50.

Seals, it turns out, are strangely fragile creatures. They are susceptible to parasites and viruses. They are prone to injuries. With their layers of fat and thick muscle, they are also prone to getting eaten — the Big Mac of the ocean. And seals, for all their seeming tranquility and good humor, are oddly high-strung animals — particularly juveniles, like the one currently languishing in the aquarium’s medical center. There is every possibility that this seal may just worry itself to death. Which would not be such an earth-shattering event — about 60 percent of seals don’t make it through their first year. "We are all mesmerized by the look of a young seal," says LaCasse, "but nature has a harsh equation when it comes to survivability."

If the sickly seal does make it, it will be released into Boston Harbor, where it may live for as long as 50 years. If the seal dies, it will make the shorter journey to the back of this building, where, like every dead animal that comes into the aquarium’s possession, it will undergo a necropsy to determine the cause of death. This is the side of the aquarium that the vast majority of its visitors never get to see. The few outsiders who do get to witness a necropsy don’t always make it through the entire process. As one biologist puts it, "We’ve lost people during necropsies. A lot of people faint."

Still, I find myself increasingly curious to see the darker side of the aquarium’s work with these animals, and so I ask LaCasse if I might attend a necropsy. "It’s smelly and bloody and not very pleasant," he says. This grim assessment is echoed by Belinda Rubenstein, one of the institution’s veteran biologists, who has cut up more dead seals than she cares to count. "Some animals are very yucky," she says. "Sometimes you get a really bad animal that makes you ..." She jerks her body forward in a mock dry heave.

Each year, Rubenstein performs scores of seal necropsies; the New England Aquarium as a whole does hundreds. It is, say aquarium employees, among the most vital work they do. On one hand, the examinations give biologists a sense of the issues facing a seal population at any given time. More important, though, dead seals also serve as a means to gauge the condition of area waters in general. "They give us a snapshot into the health of the wildlife population," says LaCasse. "They can provide an insight into what’s happening. The necropsies provide data that has value for human beings. We call this the earth, but we are a water planet. The effect of the ocean on our lives is greater than ever."

Yet there is more than abstract scientific curiosity at work here. For 30 years, the aquarium has served as a medical-examiner’s office for New England, conducting the same types of postmortems that might be done at a city morgue. Generally, the results of these tests point to relatively mundane causes of death. "They may give us indications that there’s a viral outbreak, or whether animals aren’t feeding well," says LaCasse, adding, "We’re also looking for human interaction."

For the most part, "human interaction" amounts to unhappy but blameless encounters between seals and boats, or seals and fishing gear, or even seals and pet dogs. Since 1972, however, seals have been protected by the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act, and occasionally the aquarium’s medical examiners will be called upon to help out in a criminal investigation. Usually, this involves what are known as "opportunistic" crimes — drunken goons shooting at basking seals with guns or even stabbing them with knives. Recently, though, the aquarium has found itself at the center of a considerably more unusual — and more sinister — case.

Since last July, says Andy Cohen of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), nine dead seals have been found between Wells, Maine, and Plymouth, Massachusetts. In itself, there is nothing unusual about this — hundreds of expired seals wash up on the New England coast every year. What concerns Cohen, the special agent in charge of the investigation, is that the animals had been mutilated in what appears to be a systematic way — some were decapitated, some skinned, and some, the males, had their genitals removed. "This was no hack job," Cohen says. "Someone knew what they were doing."

Though Cohen stops short of saying there’s a poaching ring at work in the area, there has been speculation that the seals’ sex organs are being shipped to the Far East, where they’re used as aphrodisiacs. "We have several leads," says Cohen. "I can’t tell you that an arrest is imminent." Whether an arrest is made could very well hinge on the work Rubenstein and the rest of the aquarium’s biologists are doing on the case. "Right now we’re collecting evidence," Cohen continues. "The New England Aquarium will advise us on what they think is the cause of death and try to make connections, just like any criminal investigation." For her part, Rubenstein is keeping tightlipped about her role in the case. "It’s under investigation," she says. "The seal I saw was skinned. It did not die of natural causes."

A petite mother of two young boys, Rubenstein, 35, does not look like the type who might enjoy spending her days up to her elbows in rancid blood and gore. But after more than a decade of working with seals — dead and alive — there is very little that fazes her. In the aquarium’s necropsy room, for example, I spot an opaque plastic container bearing a label marked "1981." Foolishly, perhaps, I ask if I might take a look inside. She peels back the lid to reveal a thick soup of red-brown matter. The odor is overwhelming, indescribable. Between heaves, I ask Rubenstein what this hellish slop is. "It’s the stomach contents of a porpoise," she says breezily. "That’s why it smells so bad."

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Issue Date: March 26 - April 1, 2004
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