Federal wildlife officials are investigating the death of a whale that was found Sunday night on the bow of a ship docked in the port of Gloucester City, a busy commercial hub on the Delaware River in South Jersey. <\/p>\n
The U.S. Coast Guard’s Delaware Bay sector reported the carcass in the Gloucester Marine Terminal around 11:15 p.m. The mammal, measuring between 25 and 30 feet long, was caught on the bow of an unidentified ship, the Marine Mammal Stranding Center said<\/a> Monday in an Instagram post.<\/p>\n MORE:\u00a0Flakely Gluten Free bakery to move from Manayunk to Bryn Mawr in February<\/a><\/p>\n The Brigantine-based wildlife rescue said it appears to be a fin whale, an endangered species that’s known to dwell in waters from New York south to Cape May<\/a>. The Gloucester Marine Terminal is part of the Port of Philadelphia complex on the east side of the river near the foot of the Walt Whitman Bridge. <\/p>\n Experts from MMSC went to the port Monday to recover and examine the whale. They plan to conduct a necropsy to determine its cause of death. <\/p>\n The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Law Enforcement will lead an investigation. Scientists at the agency often lead investigations into unusual whale deaths<\/a> as part of an effort to understand the increase in stranding events \u2014 most commonly involving humpback whales \u2014 over the last decade. Whales and other species are covered in U.S. waters by the Marine Mammal Protection Act.\u00a0<\/p>\n MMSC and NOAA could not immediately be reached for comment Monday afternoon. <\/p>\n In recent years, some citizen groups and Republican lawmakers<\/a> have linked the deaths of marine species in the region to offshore wind development. The NOAA and the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management have not found substantive evidence<\/a> supporting such claims related to wind surveying and construction activity. In many cases, they have noted that stranded whales had injuries consistent with ship strikes, entanglement in fishing nets and exposure to other human activity along routes leading to major ports in New York and New Jersey.<\/p>\n Last year, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) announced $3.7 million in funding for ecological research<\/a> on offshore wind energy and whale behavior in the state’s offshore wind lease areas. The industry has faced economic challenges and political opposition from the Trump administration, which paused leases for five East Coast projects<\/a> in December citing national security risks. <\/p>\n South Jersey’s largest wind energy project, formerly led by Atlantic Shores, was canceled<\/a> last summer after several years of planning to build more than 200 turbines off the coast of Atlantic City. <\/p>\n MMSC said it will provide updates on its findings about the whale at the Gloucester Marine Terminal. <\/p>\n