Stranding Team eager to pull whale on shore
BY PETER B. BRACE
Eight years after a 47-foot sperm whale washed up on Low Beach, a long-dead 23-and-a-half-foot humpback whale carcass is threatening to roll up on the beach near ’Sconset.

It is estimated that this humpback whale had been dead for quite some time. According to the experts, there has been a die-off phenomena among humpbacks.

First sighted on Christmas Day bobbing in the surf in front of the beach near Tom Nevers Pond, the dead humpback then brushed the shore near Codfish Park and lingered about 20 feet off the beach between Sankaty Head Lighthouse and the Hoicks Hollow Road public beach access, according to Marine Mammal Stranding Team member Edie Ray.

“What we’re hoping to do is get a line on it and pull it up on shore and do a necropsy on it,” said Ray last Thursday morning. “Everybody is very, very interested in getting samples from this whale because apparently there has been a very high mortality rate among humpback whales.”

Connie Merigo, Rescue Program Director at the New England Aquarium, and Mendy Garron, Northeast Region Marine Mammal Stranding Coordinator for National Marine Fisheries under the National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration, confirmed the die-off phenomena among humpbacks, which are typically in Nantucket waters in December, feeding closest in the waters of the Georges and Stellwagen Banks.

“The effort to investigate the whales that are dying is being headed up by the National Marine Fisheries Service,” Merigo said. “We wanted to try to get this animal ashore and collect some samples and see if there were obvious causes of death.”

Merigo added that the juvenile, male humpback weighs around 15,000 pounds and it “is in what we call a mid-to-late code three rate of decay.”

She estimated that this whale has been dead and floating around in the ocean for several weeks to several months.

Garron noted that NOAA is aware of a surge in whale deaths during a nine-month period in 2006.

“We’ve had an increase of humpback mortality within the Northeast Region, which extends from Maine to Virginia,” Garron said. “We’ve had 23 mortalities within the Northeast region since March of 2006. Most of these carcasses have been found offshore floating, which really poses a logistical problem for us, so most of these carcasses have not been examined.”

Garron said there was a similar die-off of humpback whales in 2003, when NOAA found bodies floating in the Georges Bank where many of the whales that died in 2006 were seen. But Merigo said she saw no indications that the 23-foot humpback whale now drifting along Nantucket’s eastern shore met its maker in a collision with a ship, entangled in fishing gear or run over by a propeller.

As of late Friday afternoon, the whale had drifted south just off

Sankaty Head. Marine Mammal Stranding Team member Debbie Miller said that Merigo and her team were on their way off island at that time, having given up on trying to lasso the humpback’s tail to drag it on shore to take skin samples and perform a necropsy.

“It’s floating in the water. We can’t seem to get a line on it. It’s in a really severe state of decomposition,” said Miller on Friday.

I