The science of saving Ms. Blue: Seymour Center’s 87-foot whale gets an eco-friendly makeover

At the end of McAllister Way on UC Santa Cruz’s Coastal Science Campus, the land surrenders to the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. From here you might see birds, otters — and if you’re lucky, a whale. If you’ve ever wondered how you measure up against these giant mammals, you can turn around and walk approximately 300 feet to find out.  

Here is where Ms. Blue, an 87-foot-long blue whale skeleton, resides. Her bones have been on display in this spot next to the Seymour Marine Discovery Center for the past 25 years. In 1979 she washed onto the shore of Pescadero Beach, where her bones were saved by members of the UC Santa Cruz community. They were later mounted to a steel structure at Long Marine Lab in 1985.  

Over the years, the salty sea air has caused her bones to deteriorate and the metal support structure that holds them to rust. In 2023, parts of the skeleton were removed from their mount to protect the bones and visitors – they have been placed on the ground so visitors can still view them.  

Now, the Seymour Center is working on sustainable solutions to restore Ms. Blue and ensure she will live on for years to come. The restoration is expected to take 18 months once the center reaches its first fundraising goal of $350,000.

Traditional bone restoration methods involve using plastic, synthetic foams and chemicals that are toxic to marine life, a prospect that the Seymour Center did not want to subject Ms. Blue to. “We couldn’t stomach the idea that we would be restoring this animal with the very technology and manufacturing that is creating the problem in the ocean to begin with,” said Jonathan Hicken, the Seymour Center’s executive director. “So, we started asking ourselves, is there a more responsible way to do this?” 

This decision led the center to seek out creative new ways to restore the bones while causing the least amount of harm to the environment and marine life. A diverse group of collaborators, including experts at UC Santa Cruz and local companies, are coming together to breathe new life into the old bones.  

Shrimp putty  

The first course of action is to repair the bones that are cracked. Marco Rolandi, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UCSC, and his students created a bone-repair putty made from the very thing whales eat — shrimp. The putty is made from chitosan, a substance found in shrimp and lobster shells, and calcium carbonate, a substance found in chalk.  

Rolandi is part of the university’s Materials Science and Engineering program. This group of researchers and students works to develop new materials for sustainable technology, such as renewable energy and biomedical devices.

For over a decade, Rolandi has been exploring chitosan’s use as a “biomaterial” – a material made from plants, animals or other life forms –  in electronic devices that interact with living tissue. So when the Seymour Center reached out to him for help, chitosan was the first material that came to mind. Chitosan is made from chitin, a type of sugar that provides structure to crustacean exoskeletons and the cell walls of fungi.  

Bones are primarily made of collagen, a protein that makes them flexible enough to absorb stress, and calcium, a mineral that makes them stronger. It occurred to Rolandi that chitosan can fulfill a similar role to collagen, while chalk could be used to add calcium.  

With all the materials in mind, it was then a matter of finding the right consistency so the putty would stick to the bones and dry properly. The first iterations of the putty that Rolandi’s students, UC Santa Cruz undergraduates Ashwin Marichetty and Rishima Agnihotri, created were too liquid.  

“I told them that they needed to make it like pizza dough,” Rolandi said. “It needs to be soft and squishy but at the same time, if you put it somewhere, it needs to stick there.” 

It took the team over six months to nail down the proper texture, learn that a heat gun is the best way to dry it and, finally, apply it to a bone. “It did take a lot of time to get to that point. It took a lot of failed experiments and figuring out what went wrong where. [I feel] proud and happy that we could be a part of this,” Agnihotri said. 

The project has been more than an opportunity for Rolandi to innovate; he is excited to play a part in restoring Ms. Blue for generations to come. He shares a fond childhood memory of falling in love with the ocean and its creatures after seeing a giant whale skeleton at a museum in Genoa, Italy, near his hometown.   

“What’s exciting is to think about how many kids are going to be able to see [Ms. Blue] the next few years,” Rolandi said. “We’re just playing a very small part in it, but it’s really fulfilling.” He hopes that children visiting Ms. Blue in the future will feel the same connection to the ocean that he did decades ago.  

So far, the scientists have succeeded in using the putty to repair bones from other whale skeletons. It will be used to restore Ms. Blue’s damaged bones once the center has finished fundraising for the restoration project 

Recycled bones  

The Seymour Center hopes to preserve as many of Ms. Blue’s original bones as it can, but the bones that are beyond repair will be replaced with 3D-printed replicas made from recycled plastics. The replicated bones will be manufactured by SwellCycle, a Westside-based company that 3D-prints surfboards.  

Patricio Guerrero, Pol Riera and Nathan Jackrazi co-founded the company after learning how much waste is created when making a surfboard. As Jackrazi explains, the process of making a surfboard is subtractive, which means a manufacturer removes material to create a shape, generating waste. The SwellCycle co-founders wanted to create an additive process for making surfboards — and further reduce waste by doing so with recycled materials. Additive manufacturing is the opposite of a subtractive process: Material is added only where it needs to be, rather than taking away unwanted material. 

Guerrero, who as an engineer for Disney’s theme parks and attractions previously designed two-legged robots, and Jackrazi, who worked in advanced manufacturing and aerospace engineering, used their mechanical engineering backgrounds to build a 3D printer in Guerrero’s home. Then they made their first surfboard out of recycled plastic.  

After learning about the company, Hicken reached out to see if the technology could be used to print whale bones. The SwellCycle team was excited to test the limits of their technology and surprised to learn that the process of replicating a whale bone is the same as the traditional way of making a surfboard — starting with a large piece of material and removing some of it to create a shape.  

First, Halon Entertainment used laser technology to create a three-dimensional scan of Ms. Blue bones. The scan was also used to create a digital 3D model of the skeleton and body for an augmented reality experience. Halon is a visual effects studio based in Glendale, near Los Angeles, that created computer graphics for films such as “Avatar,” “Jurassic World” and several films in the Star Wars series.

Since SwellCycle’s 3D printers typically make tall and slender surfboards, they are large enough to print the bone in a few pieces. Inspired by the spongy internal structure of real bones, the printer fills the bones with intersecting wavy lines of the recycled plastic to create what’s called a gyroid infill. This makes the bones stable in all directions and lightweight. These lines are added layer by layer until the bone is complete. Workers then puzzle the pieces together and protect them with a water-based sealant that they created. The sealant, which is made from nontoxic materials, gives the bone a texture that mimics a real bone. 

“Bones are not meant to live outside the flesh; if they’re outside of it they [will] corrode from the inside. We’ve designed for [the replica bones] to be fully sealed and stand [for] many years,” said Jackrazi. “They will outlast the rest of Ms. Blue, ultimately.” 

Jackrazi described this project as the one SwellCycle feels most connected to: “For us to be able to continue helping restore Ms. Blue and preserve her identity as much as possible, it’s big and it’s a permanent connection [to Santa Cruz.] We’re stoked and we’re very happy to be doing this.”  

Her future  

Ms. Blue will also be getting a new mount to replace her rusty old one. Currently, the structure connects all the vertebrae together; if one vertebra needs to be removed for repair or replacement, the entire spine needs to be unthreaded. To avoid this, Dinosaur Valley Studios — a Canadian company that specializes in designing natural history exhibits — will be creating a cradle mount for her. This means each bone will be individually supported, making it easier to remove the bones as needed.  

In the workroom at the Seymour Center, Hicken muses on the future of Ms. Blue. Putty made from shrimp and bones made from recycled plastic are just the beginning, he said. While the goal is to preserve as many of the whale skeleton’s real bones as possible, the Seymour Center suspects that eventually, the environment will wear down the bones to the point that Ms. Blue will need to be completely replicated.  

Hicken sees this as an opportunity to continuously explore climate-friendly technology and manufacturing. He talks about a future where whale bones are made of carbon-sequestering concrete and fungus. Scientists are still experimenting with ways to create concrete that can trap carbon and prevent it from going into the atmosphere. If they succeed, swapping regular concrete with its carbon-capturing counterpart could help alleviate effects of climate change. He points to a green silicone mold of a whale vertebra: “Someday, we actually are going to attempt to mold a bone out of fungus.”

Ms. Blue was estimated to be around 50 years old when she washed ashore in 1979. She has gone through countless changes in her almost 100 years of life and afterlife. The next century will bring even more transformations for the blue whale. 

“You can imagine Ms. Blue starts to become a mosaic of all of these different climate solutions in action and a living history of these innovations in our community,” Hicken said. “That’s our vision for Ms. Blue and how we’re going to continue restoring her long term.”

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