A recent spate of whales washed up on the state’s beaches may be coincidence but ship strikes, fishing lines, sonar and climate change are all taking a toll
Saturday 16 May 2015 13.00 BSTLast modified on Saturday 16 May 201517.18 BST
Last week, scores of local residents made their way to Sharp State Park in Pacifica, California, a 20-minute drive south of San Francisco, to view the body of a humpback whale that came ashore on 4 May.
When the 32-foot female humpback whale’s body came ashore, after days being tossed by waves, it was only the latest in a string of strandings along northern California’s Pacific coast.
Moe Flannery, a stranded marine mammal responder and manager of the Department of Ornithology and Mammalogy at the California Academy of Sciences, is quick to dispel a desire to look for conspiracy theories over the whales’ deaths.
“This is not a beaching,” she begins, “it is a stranding,” explaining that a stranding occurs when the animal washes ashore and does not deliberately go on to the beach. This usually happens after the animal is injured.
Flannery and the academy believe that it is “likely” the most recent whale was hit by a ship at sea and washed ashore after dying. Her team, which conducted the necropsy, says there were “signs of trauma consistent with blunt force”.
While Flannery does not deliver an exact cause of death – “because we were not there to witness the animal die” – she believes this death, and the others in recent weeks along the California coastline, are accidents and the timing is coincidental.
“We cannot make assumptions or theories of why there have been this number of incidents in recent weeks because we did not physically witness the trauma,” she argues.
On 14 April, also in Pacifica, a 48ft sperm whale washed ashore. Researchers are unsure of exactly what occurred in the ocean but report the whale was emaciated and had slight hemorrhaging, which could have been the result of a ship collision. Shortly after that incident, an orca came ashore north of San Francisco in Fort Bragg. According to researchers there, the orca appears to have been injured as a result of fishing nets and was also showing signs of hunger.
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