How did it start?
Killer whales jumping © NOAA
'Fishes Royal'
The Museum has been able to record whale dolphin and porpoise for a long time because of a statute that was passed in 1324.
The 1324 statute gave the Crown qualified rights to cetaceans stranded on, or caught in the waters of England and Wales.
The animals were described as 'Fishes Royal’ and in layman’s terms this mean the Crown had ‘first claim’ on them.
What were stranded whales used for ?
In those times the animals would have had great economic value and the Crown would have found a variety of uses for them. For instance the oils would have been used for :
- lighting
- heating
- foodstuffs
- soaps
- lubricants
Bones could be used to make
- furniture (vertebrae)
- fence pickets (ribs)
Later, whale bone or the keratin baleen plates, were used in the making of corsets.
One exceptionally valuable product from sperm whales was ambergris, a gray waxy substance formed (as an impaction) in whale intestines. Ambergris was incorporated into cosmetics, headache remedies, perfume and even love potions.
What changed ?
However in 1913, by agreement with the then Board of Trade, these rights were transferred to the Museum for scientific research.
The first animal reported to the museum was in the summer of 1913, a female Cuvier´s beaked whale, Northern Ireland.
Initially information was stored in a card index. Now though, information is collated and entered on computer.
Each animal is given its own unique stranded whale (SW) number and as much information as possible is gathered about
- where and when it stranded
- its sex
- its length
- its cause of death, if known.
The resulting database is used to
- produce distribution maps
- analyse information about different species
- behaviour
- biology
- ecology
Contact us
Cetacean strandings project
Natural History Museum,
Cromwell Road,
London, SW7 5BD, UK.
Tel: 0207 942 5155
Email us