WHALE REMAINS AT JOUGLA POINT, PORT LOCKROY

Blue Whale Remains, Balaenoptera musculus

Along the stony shore of Jougla Point, near Port Lockroy on the Antarctic Peninsula, a scatter of great bones lies open to the wind. 

The skeleton is that of a blue whale, Balaenoptera musculus, the largest animal ever known to have lived on Earth, though the assemblage may include bones from other baleen whales discarded during the industrial whaling era. 

Visitors approach in Zodiacs to find vertebrae the size of millstones, jaw elements curved like crossed oars, and ribs arcing across the gravel. 

It is a stark and unsentimental record of the 20th-century hunt that once emptied Antarctic waters of their giants.

Blue whales are baleen mysticetes within the rorqual family, engineered for long migrations and high-volume filter feeding. 

Adults can exceed 30 meters in length and reach masses over 150 tonnes — a scale that eclipses even the largest dinosaurs. Their fossil record is surprisingly young. 

Although whale ancestors arose in the Eocene (~50 million years ago), the lineage leading to modern rorquals, including blue whales, diversifies during the Miocene and Pliocene (roughly 23–2.6 million years ago). 

Fossil mysticetes from California, Italy, Peru, and New Zealand document that transition: from toothed baleen ancestors to fully edentulous filter feeders with vaulting skulls and expandable throats built for krill-rich seas. 

True “blue whale–like” forms appear only in the Pleistocene and Holocene, making these colossal cetaceans a relatively recent evolutionary experiment.

In life today, blue whales occupy vast swaths of the global ocean, moving seasonally between high-latitude feeding grounds and lower-latitude calving areas. Major populations persist in the North Atlantic, North Pacific, eastern tropical Pacific, Southern Ocean, and waters off Australia and New Zealand. 

Their preferred summer feeding grounds lie in zones of upwelling and krill abundance — places like the California Current, the Subantarctic Front, and the Scotia Sea.

The industrial era nearly erased them. 

Prior to commercial hunting, global numbers likely exceeded 250,000 individuals. By the 1970s, after decades of relentless Antarctic whaling, their numbers crashed to less than 1% of pre-exploitation levels. 

With international protections in place, blue whales are recovering slowly but unevenly. 

Current estimates hover around 10,000–25,000 animals worldwide — still critically small for a species of such enormous ecological footprint.

Despite their rarity, blue whales remain visible to those who seek them. They are encountered off California and Baja, around Sri Lanka, in the Gulf of Corcovado, the Tasman Sea, the Kerguelen Plateau, and sporadically across the Southern Ocean. 

In these places, the sea shines with plankton and the long low blows of a whale may hang in the air like cold breath.

At Jougla Point, the story is told through bones weathering in chilly silence — a natural museum without walls. I am generally in search of fossil remains, but these hit all those same emotions. Barring our intervention and natural disaster, these great beasts can live to be more than 100 years old. What they must see over those long years.   

And, how do we know how old they are? We can estimate age by reading earplug layers (like tree rings) in deceased whales — each waxy layer marks a period of life, helping confirm those long lifespans.