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Watch: How To Clean Your Whale
By
Claire Lampen
Published Sep 5, 2019
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Navid Baraty/Gothamist
By
Claire Lampen
Published Sep 5, 2019
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It's getting to be about that time again: annual bathtime, not yours (well, maybe yours), but your blue whale's.
Grooming your whale, the enormous one hanging in the atrium of your stately home, presents highly specific problems. For starters, she's especially large, and going into the Big Scrub, you might be wondering how many hours (days?) you need to set aside for a deep clean. Also, is it okay to use water? Yes, she came from the sea, but she's been swimming on your ceiling for 50 years: would water shock her system? And how do you deal with the smegma crusting up her cetacean crevices?
The whale in 1968.
Courtesy of the AMNH
Luckily, the seasoned whale custodians over at the American Museum of Natural History basically wrote the book on bath day. They're cleaning the 94-foot, 21,000-pound model blue whale living in the Irma and Paul Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life today, and will livestream the event, so you don't even need to bother YouTubing "how to clean my whale." Tune in here at 1:30 p.m., and they'll walk you through it.
Pro-tip: You still have a few hours to secure a vacuum, and we recommend that you do. An AMNH rep previously told Gothamist that the easiest way to clean a giant whale, at least a fiberglass one who lives on dry land, is to just suction up "the residue" blanketing its colossal bod, because said residue is "simply common dust, similar to what you might find around your home." For sure, this is going to be "a big job because she has a lot of surface area," as Dean Markosian, Director of Project Management in the Exhibition Department put it, emphasizing a truth you already knew about your whale. "It's the largest animal that we currently know has ever lived," after all. But bathtime comes for us all, inhabitants of the AMNH menagerie very much included.
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Claire Lampen
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