‘Frozen solid’ 15-ton whale on New Jersey beach poses a problem — and a mystery
.png "A humpback whale washed up dead on a New Jersey beach was frozen solid, making it difficult to remove, or find a cause of death.")
A dead whale washed up on a beach is both a mystery and a frustration for New Jersey officials.
Hardened by the cold, the 15-ton whale can’t be autopsied, or even moved, by traditional means — and it’s been sitting dead at Barnegat Lighthouse State Park since Christmas Eve, drawing onlookers all the while, the Asbury Park Press reported.
“It was amazing, but it was so sad,” Nicole Crisp, a beach visitor from Pennsylvania, told the outlet. “I don’t know if it was injured by a propeller, I’m not sure ... but it was incredible.”
The 31-foot male humpback whale is “frozen solid,” Bob Schoelkopf, co-director of the Marine Mammal Stranding Center, told the Associated Press.
Looking from the outside, it’s not clear what killed it. But the whale’s flesh has frozen too hard to cut into and search for clues, he said. “There’s not much we can do. Cutting into a frozen whale like that isn’t going to be easy.”
Massive as whales are, they’re typically removed from beaches piece by piece, but that’s not possible in this case, the AP reported.
Schoelkopf’s team was looking for an offsite location where the body could be taken and thawed, according to the outlet. No easy task.
But as of Monday afternoon, the whale was buried in the sand using a pair of bulldozers.
“We needed to do something with it and we couldn’t leave it there any longer; there were just too many people coming near it,” Schoelkopf told the AP.
Schoelkopf warned that the whale could be diseased, and that visitors to the beach should keep clear of it, NBC10 reported.
At least two other humpback whales have been found dead along the Jersey shore in the last three months, one of which was entangled, according to the TV station.
Humpback whales were nearly hunted to extinction, but populations have recovered, thanks in large part to a global hunting moratorium enacted in 1966, according to OCEANA, an ocean life advocacy group. While still on the endangered species list, they are currently considered a species of least concern.
Human activity remains a significant threat to humpback whales, and other whale species, as well.
Nearly 100 humpbacks deaths have been reported since 2016, and of those, ship strikes, entanglement, or other human interaction played a part, the Asbury Park Press reported.