NEWS YOU CAN USE: How Do You Dismantle a 90-Ton Whale? Start With a Strong Stomach and a Machete.

The blue whale is the world’s largest mammal, but that doesn’t mean it is easy to see or study. Unless you’re inside.

That is why Jacqueline Miller found herself clad in a hotel shower cap, fisherman’s chest waders and rubber boots, wading into the chest cavity of a deceased whale.

Wielding a machete, the mammal technician poked through the whale’s cavity in search of its heart vessels. It took lying on her side to sever pipe-size arteries and veins from the organ, which resembled a deflated swimming pool.

After a few machete swings, she was showered in whale fluid. No Ghostbuster suffered a greater indignity. “I was totally slimed,” she said.

When the corpses of two female blue whales floated into two Newfoundland seashore villages in 2014—their undersides partly preserved by the icy Atlantic—it presented a rare research opportunity and a question. How, exactly, do you disassemble a 90-ton whale?

The rest of the report is not for the faint of heart.