The Blue whale is a carnivore whose average life span in the wild is about 80 or 90 years. It can weigh up to two hundred thousand kilos and grows to a size of around 32 metres. A blue whale's tongue alone can weigh as much as an elephant, its heart as much as a car.
And our tale today starts right here in Ireland in Dublin’s Natural History Museum known, colloquially, as the "Dead Zoo". Among the two million specimens across the disciplines of zoology, biology and geology housed here in the museum is a picture that was taken in Wexford back in 1891.
Nigel Monaghan, keeper of Ireland's Natural History Museum educates us on this incredible story of Hope, Ireland's best known Blue Whale.
Derek Mooney traveled to South Kensington in London to meet Mr Richard Sabin, the British Natural History Museum's Curator of Mammals at the Natural History Museum to learn more about 'Hope' also known as the Wexford Whale pictured above displayed in Hintze Hall at the Natural History Museum in London.
'Hope' became stranded in 1891 in Wexford Harbour in Ireland. Ten years later it was bought by the Museum and was first displayed in the Mammal Hall in 1934.
At the centre of this story is an Irishman called Ned Wickham, a lifeboat pilot in Wexford who led a team of men who rowed out to meet Hope, the Blue Whale who floundered in Irish waters in 1891.
Mooney Goes Wild reporter Terry Flanagan traveled to meet his gran-daughters Liz Sheils and Mary Costello to find out more about this man and this event.
The group of men beat the whale with metal bars in a crude attempt to slay her and Wickham eventually killed the animal when he plunged an improvised harpoon under one of the flippers, ending her misery.
Once she was dead, tourists gathered to view the body of this monster from the deep. Newspapers reported of the whale's arrival as a 'strange visitant from strange seas'.
The blue whale was driven to the brink of extinction by commercial whaling in the 1800s and early 1900s. It's one of the rarest whale species and it's estimated that there are only between ten thousand and twenty-five thousand whales left on the planet.
Richard Sears has been one of the most important Blue Whale researchers in the world for more than forty years. In 1979 he founded the Mingan Island Cetacean Studies in Quebec, where he also started the world’s first long-term observation of blue whales.
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