The Sea Inside

partly-defrosted steak – he discovers a huge tear through its centre. One almighty blow caused this rupture, and the congealed blood that lies around it. There are more contusions on the other side of the animal; clearly it was the victim of a sustained attack.
    Out of the chambers of its lungs, Rob’s fingers tease slender, long worms that infest the organs. It’s hard to resist a sense of disgust at this discovery, even though this is a minor infestation compared to the thousands of nematode worms found in large whales. Rob tells me about a particular parasite that gravitates to the genital regions of small cetaceans, from where they can complete the final cycle in their parasitic lives. There a shark will nip and gnaw at its victim, and in the act of ingestion provide the parasite with its end-user, its ultimate destination.
    As I watch Rob pull a two-inch worm out of the porpoise’s lungs, I ask if they harm the animal. Rob says they don’t appear to; but there are areas of calcification in the lungs, too, hard and brittle within the surrounding tissue, a result of former infections. It may have looked healthy, but there were plenty of assaults on this porpoise’s well-being; the presence of anthropogenic contaminants may reduce cetaceans’ resistance to such infections.
    Taking hold of the tongue, Rob removes the ‘pluck’ of the animal – the mouth, oesophagus and heart. They come away in one long lump. The heart is healthy, and looks as though it has only just stopped pumping blood around the animal’s body. Rob pulls out the valves that did this sterling work, then it too is consigned to the bin, just another piece of offal, having served its useful purpose.
    Now all that is left is the head, lying forlornly in a corner of the shallow sink. The mouth is agape. Its two rows of tiny teeth are rounded, rather than pointed like those of a dolphin, designed to grabble about in the sea bed, searching for the small prey that constitute most of the porpoise’s diet. Earlier, in its stomach folds, we found tiny squid beaks and fish otoliths, minute ear bones.
    Rob turns the head on its side and locates a tiny dent in the skin behind the eye. You need to know a cetacean inside-out to be able to locate the external aperture of this organ. The hole is barely more than a pinprick. Rob’s scalpel swiftly slices it open to show the threadlike auditory canal, a dark root running down to the tympanum. It is a bare, minimal form, since most of what the animal hears is conveyed by the spongy, oily tissue that lines its jaw.
    This strange cetaceous sound equipment – a scaled-down version of what one would find in larger-toothed whales – is thus exposed. We follow it, with the aid of Rob’s knife, from the ‘melon’ or forehead, a thick white wall of fat with bio-acoustical properties, to the ‘monkey’s lips’ buried deep below, a cartilaginous valve that snaps together to create the animal’s clicks.
    Finally, Rob digs out the ear bones or ossicles, so dense that they’re the last part of any cetacean to survive. They’re exquisitely shaped, like shells. I have three in my own collection: a time-darkened, fifteen-million-year-old fossilised specimen as heavy as a stone; a yellowing otolith from a pilot whale which had been butchered sometime in the early twentieth century; and a fresh sculptural shape I found when walking on a remote beach, bone-pale and light and multi-chambered, so intricate as to be a miracle in itself. These convoluted objects, more like musical instruments, are all that remains of their owners, their existence reduced to the echo chambers of their most intense sense. They hold the last sound they heard, just as our hearing is the last we will know of the world.
    Matt unplugs a battery-powered circular saw from its charger on the wall and hands it to his colleague; the noise revs through the room. Rob tells me, ‘You may want to step outside while I do this – there’s a possibility of aerosol.’ As he pulls down the heavy Perspex visor over his head, I move into the welcome fresh air. I have already been instructed not to put my hands in my pockets or touch my lab coat with my face, for fear of zoonotic disease; with an animal so genetically close to my own species, infection is a real risk.
    Outside the room – filled as it is now with the mingled smell of blood and the sea – the zoo’s inhabitants are going about their business, unaware of what is happening to one of