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The smell of rotten fish wafted over South Bethany, and officials struggled all weekend to remove the carcass of the 70,000-pound fin whale that washed ashore Saturday, May 13.
The 55-foot whale had been dead for two to three weeks, and there was no apparent cause of death, said Suzanne Thurman, executive director of Marine Education, Research and Rehabilitation Institute (MERR), the state’s marine mammal stranding agency.
By Monday, May 15, heavy equipment from Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC) moved the whale’s remains to Fenwick Island State Park, where it was buried.
Thurman said they collected tissue and bone samples that may provide a clue to why the whale died. However, the carcass was so badly decomposed, it was impossible to see if the whale had been struck by a boat or any other type of trauma.
The whale, which Thurman said was an adult female, was spotted drifting toward the shore. When officials from the marine-mammal stranding agency arrived, they immediately began to muster the resources to move the animal.
“We have a great relationship with the community, and this smell is really getting bad,” Thurman said.
At least one resident said he didn’t mind the smell. “How often do you get to see something like this that close?” asked Gary Stover, who owns a home overlooking the dead whale. “We watched it come ashore Saturday morning,” he said.
Hundreds of people went to look at the whale Saturday and Sunday.
An hour after dawn, Sunday morning, two tractors from DNREC came to pull the whale to the park, but they couldn’t budge the heavy carcass, even when the tractors were hooked together. Heavy equipment operators Jim Azato and Rich Hughes spent all day Sunday volunteering their time to help, but the tractors buried themselves in the sand in every attempt to move the whale.
Thurman decided to cut the whale into smaller pieces, so it could be more easily moved. Using knives, volunteers cut off most of the head and removed the skull.
However, even after the skull was removed, the tractors could not move the whale. They decided to wait until Monday, May 15, for a bulldozer. Monday morning, Thurman was overjoyed at the cavalry that had arrived. “We’ve got so much heavy equipment here now, it’s unbelievable,” she said. “I can’t thank the people from DNREC enough. They have been wonderful.”
Thurman said she will use many parts of the whale for research and for school presentations.
Fin whales (balaenoptera physalus) are common in Delaware waters, but they don’t make quite the splash as humpback whales. Fin whales rarely jump out of the water, and they don’t flap their tails. The whales are the second-largest whale, second only to the blue whale.
Like humpback whales, fin whales migrate south in the winter and to northern waters in the summer, said Jennifer Dittmar of the National Aquarium in Baltimore.
“For the most part, they stay offshore. They spend most of their time off the coast and in deeper waters,” she said.
Fin whales are filter feeders, meaning they use long, filterlike teeth, called baleen. To eat, fin whales suck in large amounts of water through the baleen. The whale will then push the water back out, licking the baleen of any creatures that have become stuck.
Fin whales are found in every major ocean in the world, but prefer deeper, colder water farther from shore.
For more information on MERR, visit their website at www.merrinstitute.org.
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