Gray whales are washing up on West Coast beaches. Most of them starved to death. -- Read and share our stories!
A stranded gray whale at Leadbetter Point State Park | Photo courtesy of NOAA |
The vultures circling overhead signaled that something was amiss on Limantour Beach at Northern California’s Point Reyes National Seashore. First we saw a hunk of baleen the size of an ice chest. Farther up the beach, the carrion eaters scattered as we came upon the carcass of a small, much-decayed gray whale. There wasn’t much left to eat anyway—the whale had been there for nearly a week, and a necropsy by a team from the Marine Mammal Center had determined that it had died of malnutrition. “We’re always looking for anything to give an indication of why the animal stranded,” says Shawn Johnson, the center’s director of veterinary medicine. “Evidence of entanglement, severe trauma from getting hit by a ship, degree of emaciation. There’s a certain shape a nice fat whale has, but sometimes in an emaciated whale the head appears bigger—they call it a peanut-head shape. The Limantour whale died at sea, and then a ship hit it, causing large wounds.” |
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|