Rough Start to Summer: A Lifeguard Has Ordered the Ocean Drained After a Whale Pooped In It
Bad news for anyone who wanted to get summer started with a nice, cool swim at the beach: a lifeguard has ordered the ocean temporarily closed and drained for cleaning after a whale pooped in it.
Families had set up their beach blankets, started volleyball games, and waded into the water when Laura Davidson, 22 and in her second year lifeguarding, looked through her binoculars and spotted a whale in the distance. Davidson saw a telltale flocculent aggregation of particles, including an undigested squid beak, bobbing behind the massive 35-year-old humpback at the water’s surface — indicating that the sea mammal had relieved himself in the ocean despite the presence of many human swimmers.
As per safety regulations, Davidson had no choice but to blow her whistle and call everyone out of the water, all around the world, while a scuba team deployed to open the ocean’s drain 36,070 feet below sea level in the Mariana Trench.
Andrew Gondry, 39, who was on the beach at the time of the incident, was displeased but understanding. “I wanted to swim,” he said. “But, ultimately, the very idea of swimming in the same ocean as a disgusting, huge whale turd is unacceptable. We’ll have to wait for the authorities to scrub the whole thing down and just go swimming in three summers.”
As Gondry noted, it will take years to drain, clean, and refill the entire ocean.
Other swimmers didn’t see the big deal. Said Jane Roland, 47: “I simply cannot get enough whale poop. It is great and I want it.”
Some marine biologist also tried to get quoted in this story, but he was boring. He said something about whale feces being high in iron and vital to the food chain and phytoplankton production, and that draining the whole ocean would lead to a hellscape of rotting fish and whale carcasses whose odor would be bad enough even if the entire endeavor weren’t setting into motion the end of all life on earth.
“Look,” said Harold Q. Roosevelt III, Chief Executive Officer of the Ocean, “I don’t know what this ‘marine biologist’ thinks we were supposed to do. The whale dropped a deuce and it was gross.”
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Jonathan Zeller is a writer, editor and comedian who’s contributed to McSweeney’s, The New York Times, and Teen Vogue.
