massive humpback whale washed up on Manhattan Beach in Half Moon Bay on Sunday, and experts believe the animal likely died after colliding with a ship.
Local scientists performed a necropsy, or animal autopsy, on the massive whale and determined it was a moderately decomposed female with ample fat and blubber reserved indicating that it wasn't malnourished.
“This humpback whale had an extensive contusion over her right chest area, a fractured first cervical vertebra and its skull was dislocated from the spinal column,” Dr. Pádraig Duignan, director of Pathology at the Marine Mammal Center, said in a news release. “These findings, combined with overall excellent body condition, strongly implicates blunt force trauma associated with a ship strike as this whale’s cause of death.”
Scientists put the whale's length at 49 feet. To get a sense of how big that is, imagine three SUVs in a row.
The whale's death is not related to the algal bloom that has overtaken San Francisco Bay in recent days. This particular type of algae doesn’t appear to make marine mammals sick and primarily impacts fish species like sturgeon and striped bass, Giancarlo Rulli, a spokesperson for the Marine Mammal Center, told SFGATE. The center hasn’t received reports of any marine mammals in distress due to the algal bloom.
Humpback whales were hunted to near extinction in the late 19th and most of the 20th century. While their numbers have increased significantly since laws were put in place to stop killings, they remain among the most endangered whales. They're found in oceans around the world and a small population of them convenes along the California coast over the summer and into the fall, before heading for Mexico's warmer waters in the winter. There are some 2,900 whales that visit the coasts of Washington, Oregon and California annually, the Marine Mammal Center said. The main threats to the whales are ship strikes and entanglements in ocean trash.