Steeped in mystery, speculation and good old-fashioned rumor, killer whale specialists have spent the past 18 months preparing for what could literally be a groundbreaking excavation project on Whidbey Island that will ideally produce as many as five skeletons from orcas killed and buried during the Penn Cove captures of 1970.

The collaborative project, being coordinated by the University of Washington, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Orca Network, seeks to find and exhume the whale remains for DNA and chemical analysis.

Dr. Mike Etnier, affiliate faculty member in the University of Washington’s anthropology department; Brad Hanson, a wildlife biologist with the Northwest Fisheries Science Center; and Orca Network co-founder Susan Berta will oversee the undertaking.

Berta had heard stories of the orca burials for years. When she contacted Hanson to ask him about a possible excavation, he came onboard. Etnier rounded out the team as a zooarchaeologist adept at studying animal bones for valuable data.

“Susan somehow tracked down the guy who operated the backhoe during the burials,” Etnier said. “He walked us out to a clearing in the woods and said, ‘This is it.’ He narrowed it down to a 50-meter stretch.”

Interviewing people around during the burials was the first step in determining the project’s viability and the specific locations of the approximately five killer whales believed to be buried at various sites on Whidbey Island.

“We have heard varying numbers of whales killed during the 1970 capture, but believe it to be four or five, likely five from the stories we’ve pieced together,” Berta said.

The team is still trying to determine where the whales are buried, she said, and exactly how many are buried at each site. At least one orca is believed to be buried at an inland Central Whidbey Island site and one on a Central Whidbey Island beach. One or more were reportedly buried at a location north of Oak Harbor, but the site has since been paved over and built on, making it inaccessible.

Aerial photographs taken before and after the burials were then used to ascertain if any ground disturbances had occurred since the 1970s.

“And finally, we did some surveying with a machine called ground-penetrating radar,” Etnier said. He enlisted the help of Joe MacGregor, a UW graduate student in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences, for the specialized testing. GPR uses common radar technology, transmitting a signal and analyzing the pattern of echoes that are returned to the equipment. The only difference with GPR is, as the name suggests, that the signal is transmitted through the ground.

“GPR is really effective for identifying what geologists call ‘non-conformities,’ which is just a fancy way of saying that it can identify disturbances in the layers of dirt — exactly the sort of thing that digging a whale-shaped hole would leave behind,” the professor and zooarchaeologist said.

The whale specialists have now tested two locations using GPR and, coupled with the testimony of the people who were present for the burials, believe enough evidence exists to warrant digging a hole.

“The next step is to dig a quick test excavation — sort of a prospecting trip,” Etnier said. “We don’t know for sure that we will find anything in the bottoms of these holes. And I want to know what we’re in for before I assemble an excavation team. So, we’ll do a quick evaluation to see if there are any bones or teeth that have survived 36 years of burial, assuming we’re in the right spot. If there are, we will return at a later date with a full excavation team to conduct a careful recovery of the remains.”

The condition of any remains is a gigantic, looming question mark. Depending on the depth of the burial and the location, the carcasses may be remarkably well preserved or very little may be left.

“Recovering a complete killer whale skeleton would be pretty amazing,” Etnier said. “There are really only a handful of complete skeletons in museums throughout North America and the rest of the world.”

One of the specimens is thought to have been buried below the water table, which in that kind of depositional environment, could mean soft tissue like blubber or muscle is preserved. It would be a smelly and quick exhumation, as the material would quickly decompose when it hit air, but it could yield valuable data.

“We’d suddenly be in the position of possibly being able to analyze those tissues for chemical contaminants,” Etnier said. “That would provide an amazing window into what the environmental conditions were like for these animals right at the time we were becoming aware of what some of the consequences of our chemical disposal practices were having.”

Even a single tooth would be sufficient to conduct a detailed genetic and chemical analysis.

“The genetics analysis will tell us if significant amounts of genetic diversity — the stuff that makes evolution or adaptation to new or changing environments possible — have been lost from the Southern Resident Killer Whales,” Etnier said. “It might also tell us more about patterns of relatedness, paternity, etc., among the living Southern Resident Killer Whales.”

The team hopes that all of the bones will be preserved at the first site, but it is unlikely soft tissue will be preserved. The excavation crew will use it as a test run before attempting to recover the individual buried below the water table.

“The first dig will be the inland Central Whidbey site, as that is the most likely spot to be undisturbed and has the largest number of witnesses who remember the exact site,” Berta said.

The only obstacle now is finding a time to meet and perform the quick test excavation that works into the team’s packed schedules.