Year’s first dead whale found off beach in Alameda
A dead whale washed ashore at a beach in Alameda on Saturday evening, becoming the first such casualty reported in San Francisco Bay this year, according to the Marine Mammal Center.
Staff at the California Academy of Sciences reported the dead whale Saturday evening floating off Robert W. Crown Memorial State Beach in Alameda, said Giancarlo Rulli, a spokesperson for the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito.
“The whale was stuck in mud and/or a sandbar offshore early this morning and has since dislodged and is now free floating with the tide,” Rulli said Sunday in an email to the Chronicle.
Rulli said several agencies — including the California Academy of Sciences, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S.
Coast Guard and local towing service partners — plan to tow the carcass to Angel Island State Park for a necropsy to try to determine a cause of death.
“We don’t know the cause of death at this point in time because we were not able to fully examine it because of the fact that it’s floating,” said Moe Flannery, the senior collection manager of ornithology and mammalogy at California Academy of Sciences.
The whale was expected to be towed Monday, Flannery said. It was not immediately clear when the necropsy would be done.
Representatives of the East Bay Regional Park District, which operates the beach, did not immediately respond to a request for more information.
The whale was confirmed to be an adult female gray whale, approximately 40 feet in length. Responders with California Academy of Sciences collected initial blubber samples and other data via boat, Rulli said.
Rulli said there are some buoys close to the whale that “mark some underwater drainage systems,” intake pipes for the nearby lagoon, but he emphasized that the whale is not the same one spotted entangled in fishing nets and buoys off the Peninsula coast two weeks ago.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared an Unusual Mortality Event from 2019 to 2023 due to the high number of dead gray whales washing ashore along the western coast of the U.S., Mexico and Canada. Researchers found that ecosystem changes led to malnutrition, decreased birth rates and vessel strikes.
“It’s not unusual at this time of year for us to see gray whales moving north on their migration, and thus it’s not unusual for us to have a few gray whales wash up now, between March and May,” Flannery said.