By Ashley Meeks

“Transferred poop to Nereid.”

Wrapped in consumer-grade white plastic bags and scooped in a fine mesh net, the whale feces traveled last week via 10-foot pole from the schooner to a research vessel.

Molly McEntee (left) and Kelsey Snapp trained their cameras on not-so-distant right whales. Above, The fluke of a right whale diving underwater. The Elsie Menota logbook tracked the day’s sightings. Chloe Taub (left) and Georgia Zildjian have a “Titanic” moment on the bowsprit. More pictures can be viewed at our Gallery Staff photos by Ashley Meeks

A group of Castine students watched excitedly from the deck of the schooner.

The researchers would examine the feces for data on fatty acid absorption and efficient copepod digestion. They would try to figure which whale the feces came from and how efficiently the food was digested.

The Calvin Project — a Castine-based student research and writing project named for one of the most famous right whales of all — might not exist were it not for a tragic death and a jar of whale poop.

On Sept. 5, 1992, a right whale  named Delilah, was hit by a ship and killed in the Bay of Fundy. Her calf Calvin (named for the rapscallion in the newspaper comics) was eight months old and still nursing.

Four days later, Delilah’s remains floated to shore. A few days after that, a necropsy was performed on the shore, attended by some local middle school students.

Boaters had seen that Delilah had a calf. No one had much hope that the calf had survived the loss of the mother.

But the next year researchers discovered that Calvin had made it. They also discovered that she was a girl.

Recently, Calvin gave birth to her own calf.

The Animaniacs, an animal welfare group made up of Castine students from The Adams School and George Stevens Academy, undertook the Calvin Project in May 2004.

The group plans to write a book about Calvin’s life as a model for an educational curriculum about endangered species.

The Animaniacs are seventh-grader Storme Macomber (absent from last week’s trip); eighth graders Molly McEntee, Kelsey Snapp and Chloe Taub, and George Stevens Academy ninth graders Georgia Zildjian and Allison Fleck.

Adams School science teacher Bill McWeeny leads the group. 

“They’re writing this book and they’d never seen a right whale,” McWeeny said. Hence last week’s two-day trip to the Bay of Fundy.

“The reason for the book,” McWeeny said, “is to try to highlight the problems that the right whales are encountering through the life story of one of the individuals in the group.”

The students are involved, McWeeny said, because he realized how valuable their voices and perspectives would be to a scientific tome.

“I wanted to write this story but I wanted it to be accessible to the general public and the secondary students, so they’re sort of the ground-proofing.

“Plus, I think they’ll add a lot of creativity to it, too.”

The Animaniacs will need the whole winter to gather the details of Calvin’s story. In the spring, McWeeny said, they may start making presentations of the story to other local schools and branch out from there.

It Started in Lubec

McWeeny got interested in right whales in 1983, when he worked with the New England Aquarium Right Whale Research Team in Lubec.

“Through high school and college my hobby was microscopes and when I got to the team, nobody was looking at anything microscopically. I volunteered myself,” McWeeny said.

When he left the team, his boss gave him a sample jar of whale droppings.

The bright burnt sienna remains of plankton and krill survived a basement flood and sat for 20 years next to a jar holding a human brain in the attic of Central Middle School in Quincy, Mass., where McWeeny taught science and math from 1970 to 1999. 

When he came to Adams School in 1999,  the jar made its way back to the scientist who gave it to him.

“It turned out to be quite valuable 20 years later because of the tests that were able to be done with it,” McWeeny said.

Other than the stuff on the 10-foot pole, the Castine students did not see any whale droppings on this, their second whale-watching trip.

Their first, last year, was to Campobello Island, where they observed minke whales.

Nor did they see Calvin.

But they were surrounded, for hours, by dozens of endangered right whales —  tractor trailer-length, scarred submarines feeding, resting and flirting with each other in the Bay of Fundy.

The trip was funded by the Castine Education Foundation, a nonprofit organization that has, in the past, sent some students to the rainforest and provided others with laptop computers.

On Sept. 27 and 28, chaperoned by McWeeny and Jeff Taub, Chloe’s father, the Castine students spent two days in New Brunswick, in St. John and on Grand Manan Island, but mostly at sea, on the lookout for whales.

Last year, McWeeny heard New England Aquarium spokesman Tony LaCasse say Calvin’s life story would be “a great one to write.”

“I started thinking, gee, maybe I could write that story.” And it could be written for secondary students, to educate them and the public in general about the “right whale problem.”

Coincidentally, all of the Animaniacs are about the age of Calvin, who was born in 1992.

“It’s not going to be cutesy,” McWeeny said. “We are going to let Calvin talk, but with a lot of caution. We’re going to try to figure out what the whales would say if they could say it.

“We’re not going to dress Calvin up.”

Tracking Calvin

The group has been given access to the “science and digits” of the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium, a group of scientific organizations who research and protect the endangered whale.

Last month they got their hands on Calvin’s sighting history, a dozen sightings per year since her birth.

Maine Maritime Academy’s professor Andy Chase is helping to plot Calvin’s history on a computer.

“We’ll next make a timeline to look at Calvin’s history in one snapshot, then start plotting her life,” McWeeny said.

Before heading to sea, the Animaniacs and their chaperones stood under Delilah’s suspended skeleton in the New Brunswick museum, holding  up their own hands, fingers outstretched, to compare them to the hand-like skeletal structure of Delilah’s flippers, complete with thumb bones.

They took notes on the museum’s tours. Soon they will be developing their own presentation to take to area schools and assemblies, while McWeeny plans to develop a generic curriculum about endangered species using Calvin as a model.

Calvin’s life, including an encounter in 1999 when she became entangled, McWeeny says, “very much mirrors the problems right whales have today.”

One of the problems right whales face — ship strikes — has been significantly reduced in part because of Delilah’s story.

Irving Oil, the biggest shipper in the Bay of Fundy, looked at the data about the Fundy feeding grounds and went to other shippers in New Brunswick to support the efforts to change their shipping lanes and protect the right whales. LaCasse said this has reduced the probability of a whale-ship collision by 90 percent.

“We actually sort of call Calvin the poster child — well she’s not a child anymore — of the right whale world,” LaCasse said. She was “so plucky and so determined to have survived.”

“It’s a little bit of the circle of life becoming complete.”

Fewer Scare Tactics

Despite the heartwarming story, teaching environmentalism is tricky. In the 1990s, McWeeny recalled, television shows and other presentations focused on environmental horror stories.

Some of the dire tone of those days remains in the lectures from crew-members on board the whale-watching trip, replete with tales of deflated Mylar balloons and yogurt lids found in dissected whales.

“People often ask me if I get a chance to touch the whales. It’s not my goal to touch a right whale,” said one crew member, who spoke at length against infringing on the right whale environment.

 Instead of guilt, McWeeny said the Calvin Project should give the students hope, “in a setting where kids aren’t going to feel totally helpless.”

“I think there was some overkill there,” McWeeny said of the last two decades’ efforts to “green” the minds of students. “Until they can think abstractly, we shouldn’t be hitting them with that stuff.”

These days, northern right whales don’t face quite the same demand for their blubber (for lamp oil) and baleen (for umbrella ribs and horsewhips) that slashed their numbers from 100,000 around 1000 A.D. to near-extinction levels by the end of the 18th century.

But since gaining protected status in 1935, their numbers have grown from 100 to only 350 due to fatal collisions with ships and the occasional entanglement in deep sea fishing gear.

Four northern right whales have been killed from ship-strikes this last winter alone.

The Calvin Project aims to localize the effort to protect the whales.

The book about the work of the Calvin Project could surface as early as the winter of 2007.

“A year from now we should be in first edits,” McWeeny said.

The group has been meeting nights, thinking up ideas for PowerPoint presentations that they could take to schools in the spring.

A senior right whale researcher, Scott Krauss, is putting together a similar, but very technical, book for college students.

“Ours is a little more lay level, covering some major points,” McWeeny said.

The introduction, which McWeeny thought up in a “flash of inspiration,” was written in the last week, in Calvin’s voice.

But beyond their work with data and books, the field work will keep the students inspired.

The trait McWeeny says is most common among environmentalists is what got them, as kids, out in nature building huts and forts.

“Environmentalists knew their neighborhood in and out,” McWeeny said.

The best tool for combating what he calls “ecophobia,” he said, is the “hands on” lesson: “things that are reachable, touchable by kids.”

“Younger kids, you don’t want to overwhelm them with big world problems. You want to be able to be in their own local environment and be comfortable with it,” McWeeny said.

The last item in the Elsie Menota logbook is as “hands on” as anyone would want.

“Approach,” it says simply.

“Whale came to us.”

The right whale that approached the boat, snout covered in white calluses, dove just as it came alongside. It was so close its tail slapped an inflatable dinghy up in the air as it went down, a prehistoric shadow gliding so close to the schooner you could reach out and touch it at the level of the waves.

Other than research vessels, most boats have to stay a minimum distance away from the whales. While they are almost as curious as dolphins, right whales are not nearly as agile on account of their size and can’t squirm out of the way of a hull or motor as easily.

This close call was cause for elation for the Animaniacs.

“That was the coolest thing that happened to me, ever, in my whole life!” Georgia Zildjan yelled.

“That was awesome!” Molly McEntee squealed, and they hugged each other gleefully.

It was a moment either of them might look back on someday, standing on the bow of a research vessel as a plastic bag of whale poop comes their way on a 10-foot pole.