Members of the Marine Animal Rescue Society wrestle with the body
of a deep-water beaked whale that had beached itself in Gulf Stream.
Michelle Quigley/The Coastal Star
By Willie Howard
A deep-water beaked whale beached itself in Gulf Stream on Sept. 18, marking the third reported beaching of a beaked whale along Florida’s east coast during September.
When Marine Animal Rescue Society volunteers responded around 4:30 p.m. that Sunday, they found the whale dead on the beach.
The response team was unable to reach that section of beach near the Gulf Stream Golf Club with a truck to haul the whale’s carcass away for examination, so they left it in the surf.
Blair Mase, marine mammal stranding coordinator for NOAA in Miami, planned a necropsy on the beach for the morning of Sept. 19 to search for clues to the whale’s demise.
But when the examination team arrived in Gulf Stream that morning, the whale was gone, apparently swept out to sea by the tide.
The next morning (Sept. 20), sea turtle nest monitors found the whale’s mutilated carcass washing up on the beach just north of the Gulf Stream Bath & Tennis Club.
They secured the whale’s decomposing carcass with a piece of rope tied to stakes in the sand until a MARS volunteer could come to the beach to extract skin and blubber samples, used to positively identify the species.
MARS volunteers usually measure the length of beached whales, but Mase said this whale’s tail flukes had been eaten, so no accurate length could be taken.
Mase had planned to have the whale’s carcass towed out to sea after tissue samples were taken, but the body was too badly decomposed to tow. It was left in the surf.
Whales and other marine mammals instinctively beach themselves when they’re sick or injured so they can breathe without having to exert themselves to reach the surface.
Mase said the whale was probably a Gervais’ beaked whale (Mesoplodon europaeus).
Gervais’ beaked whales washed ashore during September in Hobe Sound and Hollywood Beach. Both whales were still alive when they came ashore, but later died.
Laboratory work to determine what illness might have led the other two whales to beach themselves had not been completed as of late September.
Named for their elongated snouts, beaked whales are known to dive deep for long periods of time before surfacing for air. One species, the Cuvier’s beaked whale, regularly dives for an hour to depths of 3,300 feet.
Gervais’ beaked whales have spindle-shaped bodies with small, shark-like dorsal fins and slightly concave tail flukes, according to Whale and Dolphin Conservation. Their bellies are often marked with irregular white blotches.
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