October 22, 2009
The apparent victim of a ship collision, a dead 70-foot (20-meter) blue whale (pictured) washed ashore in a forbidding northern California cove this week.
Though unable to move the blue whale, scientists and students are leaping at the research opportunity, scrambling down rock faces to take tissue samples and eventually one of the 11-foot-long (3.5-meter-long) flippers.
Though relatively infrequent off California until recent years, ship collisions are "the number one human threat to blue whales," according to marine biologist Joe Cordaro of the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service.
This week's collision, he said, marks the second time this year that a ship off California has fatally wounded a blue whale.
The world's largest animals, blue whales can grow to about a hundred feet (30 meters) long—about the length of a space shuttle. Listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the whales are said to face a very high risk of extinction in the wild, largely due to heavy hunting prior to a 1966 ban.
It is thought that the because of the fresh propeller wound that a ship was the culprit of this whales demise. Blue Whale Tragedy Turned Scientific Windfall
"I'm as sorry as anybody that that animal perished," said Humboldt State University mammologist Thor Holmes (pictured above atop the whale). But to find "a fresh, female blue whale in a place that's accessible—that is amazing."
On Tuesday, Holmes and two students drove several hours to study the blue whale.
On the shore, the researchers took blubber samples, which Holmes expects will shed light on the whale's pre-collision health.
"Just the fact that the whale has a good, thick blubber layer," he said, "shows it was a really, really healthy animal."
Blue Whale to Be Left in Place
The blue whale will be left on the Fort Bragg beach, the National Marine Fisheries Service's Cordaro said. Given the cove's inaccessibility to vehicles, he added, "That whale ain't going anywhere."
But researchers are planning more tests, including an amputation of one of the blue whale's flippers this week—a potential windfall for an ongoing Humboldt For Holmes, the specimen holds great scientific promise, but also serves as a painful reminder of humanity's role in the blue whale's rarity.
"The presence of that animal on the beach," he said, "is another sign that we're malefactors on this planet."
—Ted Chamberlain
Whale photograph by Larry Wager, AP
