Last week, a giant sea creature washed ashore at a beach in Indonesia, borrowing notes from the most terrifying deep sea creature horror films. The giant creature, which seems to have decomposed beyond recognition, possibly has tusks.
The blood from its corpse has turned the water around it crimson and has the people on the island of Seram – where it washed ashore – terrified. Pictures of it circulated on the web had the whole world taking guesses at what the creature could be.
The shocking images have triggered questions about how this floating carcass made its way to an Indonesian island, and what it indicates about whale migration habits and about climate change.
When local fisherman Asrul Tuanakota first chanced upon the carcass, he thought it was a boat stuck in the water. But upon looking closely he realised it was a nearly 50-foot-long dead sea creature – what gave it away was the smell.
The Independent quoted Nikolay Kim, Deputy Head of the Forecasting department of the Sakhalin Research Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography, as saying that the creature could be "some big dolphin.” Kim called it a “rare species”.
I doubt that it lived in our waters. Most likely, the animal was brought by the warm current. We often get tropical and subtropical species here and, when they cool down, they stay here and then die.
According to George Leonard, chief scientist at the Ocean Conservancy, the carcass is probably that of a baleen whale. There are parts of the carcass that appear to be baleen plates that’s used to filter out food, said Leonard to HuffPost.
The Seram island is not far from the migration route of baleen whales, so there are chances that Leonard is right in his assessment.
Dead whales, however, usually sink to the bottom of the ocean, pointed out Live Science. Chances are that the whale had a bacterial infection that produced gases that bloated it into an unrecognisable shape. The whale may have even died in warm waters, letting bacteria breed and flourish, said Live Science.
This isn’t the first such sighting of a sea creature that has left the world baffled.
In Australia, a bloated creature was seen afloat. Locals thought it was a hot air balloon but realised later that it was a dead whale – again, the stench gave it away, reported Washington Post.
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