Just another day at work...
Every once in a while, a day at work turns out to be particularly peculiar. Take this past Wednesday, for example…
After our lab’s cetacean and sea turtle team works up stranded marine mammals and/or extracts samples from stranded sea turtle parts for research, we have lots of pieces/parts left over that have to be disposed of and lately it has been a problem to figure out how to get rid of the stuff. The solution this time was that personnel at Cape Lookout National Seashore offered to take two of us and the frozen containers of parts out a couple of miles offshore so that we could dump it and let it re-enter the food chain. In return, however, we were to allow the park to temporarily store a bunch of antique furniture in our walk-in freezer to rid the furniture of termites…this is the same, stinky freezer that houses all of our marine mammal and sea turtle parts and carcasses!
So, the first part of the day was spent loading hundreds of pounds of stinky turtle and dolphin pieces onto a boat, driving offshore, and then trying to dump the still half-frozen parts overboard. Please note that when hundred-pound blocks of frozen muscle/blubber/bone hit the water after falling a few feet, they send up a bloody back-splash that has the capacity to coat not only the ‘dumpers’, but also the entire side of what was once a nice, clean, 25-foot boat. After the dumping was complete, we then transported two truck-loads of fragile, termite-ridden furniture that was falling apart to our laboratory and then spent a quite a bit of time trying to fit all of it into our already-full storage freezer. It was like a bizarre game of Tetris...turning furniture around and around to figure out how it could be stacked and packed most closely together. Check out the results:
