When a dead blue whale floated up on a Canadian beach in April and began ballooning faster than a contestant in a hot-dog- eating contest, reports that it could explode went viral. The 81-foot whale weighed 60 tons — the equivalent
 of 60 Clydesdale horses. That’s a lot of whale guts. There were multiple videos, news reports, the hashtag #explodingwhale, and a website: hasthewhaleexplodedyet.com. Charlize Theron appeared in a Saturday Night Live sketch that featured two exploding whales. But could it really happen?

National Geographic interviewed the exploding-whale website's founder, marine biologist Andrew David Thaler, and asked, “Can a beached whale explode?”

Not likely, Thaler said. “The massive throat pouch that you see inflating is designed to fill with seawater and then force it out through the baleen. It can handle a lot of pressure.”

Try telling that to the biologist who was attempting to dissect a sperm whale carcass that washed up on the Faroe Islands when it actually did explode. In fact, says Thaler, whales usually explode as the result of “people doing stuff to them. That’s one very good reason you should never approach a dead whale carcass.”

Luckily for the residents of tiny Trout River (pop. about 600), Newfoundland, who were dealing with the stench (Thaler: “Decomposing whale is one of the worst smells in the world”), biologists successfully dismantled the carcass.