It looks like authorities will never know for sure what killed an endangered fin whale that turned up in the Port of Long Beach last week.
Researchers had hoped to take the 40-foot carcass to a nearby beach where they could cut into it for a close examination of its injuries, but they abandoned that plan on Saturday and ended up towing it out to sea where it will eventually sink and decay, authorities said Tuesday.
“We wanted to be able to find out more and learn what we could, but it just could’t happen given the holiday weekend and the availability of the people and the equipment we needed to do it,” said Michael Milstein, a spokesman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Authorities originally discovered the whale carcass floating in the port on Wednesday night. At the request of NOAA, firefighters tied it to a nearby dock, and the next morning, a team of scientists arrived to examine it.
They suspect a ship hit the whale in the open ocean and dragged it into the harbor. However, it’s not completely clear whether a blow from the ship or something else killed it.
“It’s likely that we won’t know definitively,” Milstein said.
Scientists did have the chance to take samples of the whale’s flesh, which will be analyzed for any revealing information.
But the full necropsy — an animal autopsy — would’ve given researches the chance to see if the whale had any bruising or internal injuries that could’ve come from a boat hitting it.
“It seems like a ship strike is a real possibility, but again, without some of those other details it’s just difficult to know definitively,” Milstein said.
Fin whales are the second biggest whale, growing up to about 80 feet, experts said.
It would be very unlikely for the whale to swim into the harbor on its own, according to Alisa Schulman-Janiger, one of the researchers who examined the mammal.
This particular whale was young, likely just old enough to separate from its mother, Schulman-Janiger said.
Although fin whales are endangered, they’ve proliferated along the California coast in recent years, according to experts.
There was a group of fin whales feeding about five or 10 miles away from the port in the days before the dead one showed up, according to Schulman-Janiger.
She said the whale “almost certainly” ended up in the harbor by getting caught on bulbous bow of a massive container ship, which then pushed it into the port.
