Much of the effort around the Gulf oil spill deals with clean-up. But an expedition co-sponsored by the University of Southern Maine looks at the gusher's long-term impact on whales and other marine life. Docked along the Portland Harbor among the pleasure craft, is a red, 93-foot research sailing vessel. The Odyssey, as it's called, begins its journey toward the Gulf this weekend, collecting blubber from sperm whales and other species.

University of Southern Maine Professor John Wise, who directs the Maine Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health, is leading the Odyssey's research team of 10, which includes USM students and staffers from Ocean Alliance, the environmental group co-sponsoring the voyage.

"The samples are obtained through a safe and friendly process where we biopsy the whales, so the boat pulls parallel to the whale and the whales are not fazed when you come from a parallel direction, but if you come up in behind them, just like people, they get kind of startled," Wise says. "So there's a dart that has a small tip on it that gets fired from a crossbow, hits the whale, takes a skin sample and bounces off and we collect it later."

Each skin sample will be not much wider than a pencil tip, but Wise says they will be a critical barometer of how oil and the chemicals called dispersants used to break up the oil are affecting not just whales, but all lifeforms.

"Whales are humans in the water, so they are models for humans, as well as being critical parts of the ecosystem themselves," Wise (right) says. "They're breathing air like we breathe air, so they're intergrating the air and the fish and the sea and the water in the sea so you get a clear picture of all roots of exposure."

The plan is to get more funding and continue to revisit the whales over 10, 15 years. The trip had been in the works for more than a year. But the BP-owned oil well explosion in April created new urgency, and USM and Ocean Alliance, for whom Wise also serves as director toxicology, pooled $150,000 -- enough to fund the voyage for three months.

"As far as we know, we're the only research vessel that will be down there that is not government or BP-funded or connected," says Vicki Beaver of the Ocean Alliance, who is part of the crew and will be filming videos and online updates of their trip.

The Ocean Alliance led a similar trip several years ago. "It was actually a five-and-a-half year voyage, and 950 sperm whales were sampled around the world," Beaver says. "So in a way it's sort of a mini-version of that; we're just concentrating in the Gulf and along the Atlantic Coast."

Bob Wallace (left), also of the Ocean Alliance, captained that trip and will elad the trip to the Gulf as well. "On the voyage of the Odyssey, that was pristine waters," he says. "This trip will be very different because we know it's oil-contaminated waters. We're taking precautions of having Tyvec suits and like that because if the water gets stirred up by storms we'll probably have oily water splashed on the boat."

The boat has been fitted with new equipment for the trip, and also has an on-boat cellular molecular laboratory that the team believes is the only one of its kind.

"This is the lab," says Sandy Wise, a researcher who is training researchers on the boat how to take the blubber samples and grow cell cultures. "For the voyage, we're just getting the cells growing, and when they come into port the plan is to ship them back to the lab," Wise says. "Once we have cell cultures growing, we can do things like treat them with the dispersants or treat them with the oil, or the mixture of the oil, and see what kind of molecular things happen to the cells. Does it damage DNA, does it damage the cell membranes?"

Wise will not be on the trip, but her husband and their son, Johnny, one of two USM students on the crew, will be on board.

The other is Matthew Brown. "I've always been on the human toxicology grants, and when this opportunity came up I couldn't pass this up. This is certainly going to be a life-changing opportunity."

With little time before they set sail, the crew is spending the afternoon practicing their skills out at sea. "I bought some fish from the grocery store that they will filet and prepare samples as if they were caught, so they'll make sure they'll have all the tools where they're supposed to be, and all the protocols in place and they get a little used to the rocking of the boat," John Wise says.

The crew of the Odyssey plans to head first to the Gulf of Maine to take samples from humpback whales, and then make its way down the eastern seaboard to Fort Lauderdale within two weeks. They expect to start seeing oil around Pensacola.

For links that will allow you to follow the Odyssey's trip, click here.