Jersey whale suffered ‘blunt force trauma’
LONG BEACH TOWNSHIP, N.J. — A necropsy of a whale that washed ashore on New Jersey’s Long Beach Island found numerous blunt force injuries including a fractured skull and vertebrae.
The Marine Mammal Stranding Center on Friday released observations from the procedure Thursday evening on the nearly 25-foot juvenile male humpback found dead in Long Beach Township.
Sheila Dean, director of the center, said the whale was found to have bruising around the head; multiple fractures of the skull and cervical vertebrae; numerous dislocated ribs, and a dislocated shoulder bone.
“These injuries are consistent with blunt force trauma,” she wrote on the group’s Facebook page.
Reached afterward, Dean would not attribute the injuries to any particular cause, noting that extensive testing as part of the necropsy remains to be done, with tissue samples sent to laboratories across the country.
“We only report what we see,” she said.
The animal’s cause of death is of intense interest to many amid an ongoing controversy involving a belief by opponents of offshore wind power that site preparation work for the projects is harming or killing whales along the U.S. East Coast.
Numerous scientific agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; the Marine Mammal Commission; the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, say there is no evidence linking offshore wind preparation to
whale deaths.
NOAA said Friday there have been 16 large whale deaths on the East Coast in 2024: 7 humpbacks between Massachusetts and North Carolina; 4 North Atlantic right whales, which are critically endangered, in Massachusetts, Virginia, and Georgia; two sperm whales in South Carolina and Florida; two minke whales in North Carolina and Virginia, and one fin whale in Rhode Island.
In 2023, there were 82 such large whale deaths, the agency said.
The stranding center’s website said this was New Jersey’s first whale death of the year, following 14 in 2023.
The post-mortem examination of the whale also showed evidence of past entanglement with fishing gear, although none was present when the whale washed ashore. Scars from a previous entanglement unrelated to the stranding event were found around the peduncle, which is the muscular area where the tail connects to the body; on the tail itself, and on the right front pectoral flipper.