Whale Bone...?
Moogle Pepper
Registered Users Posts: 2,950 Major grins
So I had a lot of free time today. I found my brother's whale (really not sure what it is) bone he found and did some macro shots!
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Other old bones yes.
The first image resembles a weather eroded animal sculpture of some sort.
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By the way, as a whale guy I'm compelled to point out that whale bones aren't legal to own, even if they're found long-dead on the beach. Your brother might want to consider donating it to a museum or university, someplace that has a permit for them.
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http://www.boneroom.com/faqs/specific.html
There are exceptions for very specific and limited reasons, like if you can prove you had a bone since before the law was enacted in 1972. Parts you find on the beach like this are not one of those exceptions, even if the animal died from natural causes.
This is only relevant if that's actually a vertebrae from a whale or manatee or the like, and not from a deer that died on the beach six months earlier. If it were in my living room, what I would do is ask a marine biologist at a local university to take a look at it, and they'll have an idea if A. it's from a marine mammal, and B. if there's someplace nearby that can use it for educational purposes. Your profile says you're in New Jersey, which does have plenty of marine mammals near shore -- I'm sure they get questions like this regularly.
Apologies again for the threadjack!
Edit: I can't believe my 100th post on a photography forum was talking about the MMPA in the macro section
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S---!
:uhoh
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much jail time you"ll get?
Congrats on getting the 100th post! I am glad I did something for someone! :lol
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I didn't mean to suggest you're off to jail. Actually I skipped mentioning the penalties section of the act because I didn't want to scare you. Looking at the penalty schedule, which we are all wholly unqualified to interpret, the first offense of 'collecting parts' is a fine of a few hundred dollars. The jailtime and $20,000 fines are probably aimed more towards someone killing and smuggling sea otter pelts.
The main point of the act is to make it illegal to "harass, hunt, capture, kill or collect, or attempt to harass, hunt, capture, kill or collect" any marine mammal, and on a scale of 1-10, taking what might be a whale bone from the beach rates about a 1.5 in comparison to hitting an endangered right whale with your cargo ship, or netting an entire pod of dolphins to catch the tuna traveling with them. As a regular normal guy who's had pretty minimal involvement with the justice system, I wouldn't expect them to throw the book at someone who didn't know and made an effort to get the bone to someone who could legally take it, and put it to good use -- it's not like educational organizations can just go kill a whale whenever they want a vertebrae to show to people, after all, so somebody somewhere could put it to good use. But again, I'm not a lawyer.
Don't lose any sleep over it, but it'd definitely be a good idea to find a safer home for it. Preferably one with a paper trail -- I wouldn't suggest tossing this back in the ocean, in case some enterprising/bored guy at NOAA reads this down the road and wants to know what happened to it. Actually, calling NOAA Fisheries would tell you the best course of action, really.
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It was just so cool to photograph though!
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