Another carcass of a dead whale was discovered on a beach in Northern California on Tuesday, making it the 12th one to appear in the past few months. Local wildlife officials spotted the lifeless body of the animal at the Point Reyes National Seashore.
Mary Jane Schramm, a representative from the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, said the whale carcass was headless and too badly decomposed to identify its age and species immediately.
Schramm said the condition of the animal suggests that it could have been attacked by a killer whale.
Samples taken from the whale carcass have been sent to the California Academy of Sciences for further analysis.
The recent string of dead whales washing ashore in the state has led scientist to investigate a possible connection between each incident. Some of the factors being considered include food distribution, predator behavior, shipping and even changes in the environment.
"We are seeing them coming from so many different species and various causes of death," Schramm said.
"One of the reasons we are seeing such a cluster at one time is we have very strong winds that have been blowing consistently that are washing things onto shore."
Scientists believe the dead whales could be linked to the yearly migration of gray whales. These animals make the 5,000-mile trip from their breeding lagoons in Mexico back to their feeding grounds in Alaska.
Last week, a 28-foot gray whale was found dead on Portuguese beach in Sonoma County. Officials from the California State Parks said the juvenile whale did not show any evidence of injuries suffered through trauma, which would have indicated if it had been struck by a ship.
Several days before that the carcass of a 30-foor gray whale was beached in Half Moon Bay's Kelly Beach as wildlife officials finished burying a 48-foot sperm whale and a 42-foot female humpback.
In April, two other dead gray whales washed up on a beach in Santa Cruz County, while the body of a killer whale was spotted close to Fort Bragg in Mendocino County.
Senior scientist Frances Gulland from the Marine Mammal Center said that while most of the dead bodies were gray whales, many of the carcasses were already in advanced stages of decomposition, preventing scientists from identifying the cause of death.
Gulland said the last known incident of large-scale whale deaths happened in the 1999 and 200, when around 40 whale carcasses were found on different beaches in the Bay Area.
Photo: docentjoyce | Flickr
