Ship may have killed whale found off Khor Fakkan
A dead whale was found drifting off Khor Fakkan yesterday.
The carcass, thought to be that of a Blue whale, measured about 27 metres, said a witness.
The whale was first spotted about four nautical miles from the town by port officials at 8.30am, who then towed the carcass to shore.
“It appeared to have been washed into the country’s waters by the strong current that the area has been experiencing for the past two days,” said Tarek Al Hamadi, manager of administrative and security affairs at Khor Fakkan Port.
“The whale seemed to have been injured by vessels in international waters because it has a lot of wounds,” he said.
Khaled Al Raissi, an Emirati working at the port, said the animal’s carcass was brought into the port at 11.30am and he too saw the wounds.
“It is a huge whale, 27 metres long. It looks like it was injured by a vessel’s propellers,” said Mr Al Raissi, 24.
“Teams from the municipality, coastguard and police came to the site and they managed to pull it out of the water.”
Mr Al Hamadi said the whale’s remains had been transferred to Kalba for study.
The mottled, blue-grey colouration, size, dorsal flipper and position of the dorsal fin visible from the videos match the description of a blue whale, said Dr Ada Natoli, founder of the UAE Dolphin Project.
There has been no record of a stranded blue whale on the UAE Indian ocean coastline in the past 10 years, she said.
“The movements of these whales in the northern Indian Ocean are poorly understood, as reported in literature, and from these records to 2012 no sighting or stranding of this species has been reported from the UAE coastline,” Dr Natoli said.
She said the missing posterior of the carcass and wounds described by witnesses suggest that the whale could have been fatally injured in a boat strike.
Whale sightings in UAE waters are rare. Last month, a female humpback whale and a small calf were sighted a kilometre off the coast of Dubai.
The sighting was the first confirmed live record of the highly endangered species in Arabian Gulf waters of the UAE, according to marine biologist Robert Baldwin, who studies the whales and dolphins of the UAE and Oman, according to state news agency Wam.
There has been no record of a stranded blue whale on the UAE Indian Ocean coastline in the past 10 years