Whale washes up on Florida beach

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Dead right whale brought ashore at Butler Beach
Necropsy to be performed to determine what caused the endangered mammal's death.

Posted: February 3, 2011 - 8:53am

Investigators from Florida Fish and Wildlife, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other agencies work around the remains of a 2-year-old female right whale found dead off St. Johns County.

DAN SCANLAN/The Times-Union

Investigators from Florida Fish and Wildlife, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other agencies work around the remains of a 2-year-old female right whale found dead off St. Johns County.

Biologists, some dressed in protective gear, methodically dissected the dead right whale Thursday after it had been towed ashore the night before in Butler Beach. Flensing knives cut through the inches thick skin and blubber as other scientists looked at its organs and carefully removed its bones.

She was a “dead whale swimming” until biologists removed fishing net rope gouging her head and flippers right after Christmas off Daytona Beach, according to one federal official.

Despite the rescue effort, one of two done recently off North Florida, time ran out this week for a 2-year-old North Atlantic right whale.

Thursday, the right whale — familiar to scientists due to satellite tracking during its young life — was rendered into 15,000 pounds of bone, baleen and blubber as scientists performed a necropsy on Butler Beach off the 5700 block of Florida A1A.

Initial results show the juvenile whale was 20 percent underweight due to the inability to feed because of rope embedded in its mouth, plus shark bites near its tail that cut large veins and led the weakened mammal to its death.

“Right whales are highly endangered, so any time we lose one individual, it’s a pretty devastating thing,” said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration biologist Barb Zoodsma.

“This was a female and she had a life of calf reproducing in front of her, so that is doubly disappointing. We just need to learn from this and figure out how we can do things better,” she said.

It was a sad way to end for a whale born during the 2008-2009 calving season and seen by biologists net-free off Florida’s northeast coast a year ago, said Mary Clemons, a volunteer Marineland whale watcher who observed Thursday’s investigation with a crowd of tourists and residents.

“I am very saddened,” Clemons said. “This is really tragic because they are endangered, and being a female, she had many lives that could propagate this species.”

Only about 350 right whales are known to exist, making them among the most endangered and protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. They normally spend summers feeding off New England and Canada, then swim into Georgia and Florida waters to give birth between mid-November and mid-April.

Getting hit by boats or entangled in nets are their greatest threats, agency spokeswoman Karrie Carnes said. A few cases of entanglement are reported annually in the Southeast, this one spotted Christmas Day by a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission survey team.

Crews went out to help the whale off Daytona Beach on Dec. 30 and tried again Jan. 15, sedating it in order to remove 150 feet of rope and wire mesh that had cut it.

“This whale was terminally entangled, meaning that when we performed the sedation and disentanglement, it was essentially a dead whale swimming,” Carnes said.

Biologists said they found more rope Thursday in its skin, with some wounds even healing around it while deep, rotting lesions marked spots where rope had been removed. Those and the shark attacks left the whale “very compromised and very weak,” Carnes said.

The dead whale was sighted 12 miles off Palm Coast on Tuesday and towed to Butler Beach late Wednesday. By 10 a.m. Thursday, crowds watched biologists cutting the 30-foot-whale apart, all staying upwind of its rotting smell. A backhoe removed the head, with lower jaws and tongue, as the intestines were laid out in rows of 8-foot-long sections for investigation.

“There is still a lot we have yet to learn,” Zoodsma said. “We believe right whales are not feeding when they are down here, yet at the same time this one may have been or trying to feed, so we are interested to look at the intestines to see if there was any food stuff in there.”

Carnes said the whale’s bones will probably be donated to a museum. The rest, including thick blubber under its barnacled skin, will be buried deep enough on a St. Johns County beach to discourage dogs and scavengers.

One onlooker was St. Augustine sixth-grader Juliet Maneely, with her parents to learn as officials discussed the endangered mammal with visitors. She watched as they explained a section of its comb-like baleen, used to strain the shrimp-like krill it eats.

The dead whale was “smelly,” but more interesting than school, she said.

“I can ask more questions and people here know more than the people at school do,” the 11-year-old said.

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What to do if you see a right whale:

NOAA reminds boaters to stay a federally-mandated 500 yards away from a live right whale, preventing injuries or even death from nets or collision. Anyone who sees a dead, injured, or entangled whales should call the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission at 1-888-404-3922 (FWCC). All live right whale sightings by boaters should be reported to the U.S. Coast Guard via Channel 16.

Read more at Jacksonville.com: http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2011-02-03/story/dead-right-whale-brought-ash...