Another whale has washed ashore along the Oregon Coast over the weekend. This time, a 40-foot, 19-ton gray whale washed ashore along Tillicum Beach near Yachats.<\/p>\n
YACHATS, Ore. \u2014 Over the weekend, a nearly 40 foot gray whale washed ashore long the Oregon Coast. Now researchers are trying to determine what\u2019s behind the latest whale to be found along the beach.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This is the second gray whale<\/a> to wash up along the beach in the last couple of weeks in Oregon. More than a dozen whales have washed up along both Oregon and Washington<\/a> coasts during the same time period.<\/p>\n For two days, Jim Rice, the coordinator of the Oregon Marine Mammal Stranding Network, has been trying to determine why another whale has washed ashore.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe expect to see some gray whale strandings this time of year it’s just normal, this is the northward migration of gray whales, they have spent the winters in the lagoons of Baja California,\u201d said Rice.<\/p>\n This time of year, whales make their way back up north to the foraging grounds of the Arctic.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe believe these whales are not getting enough nutrition, a failure of not finding enough food in the Arctic during the summer foraging season,\u201d added Rice.<\/p>\n Rice said it could take weeks before they get the results from the necropsy, but said the changes in the Arctic could be a reason these animals are dying.\u00a0 He expects to see even more of these whales to wash ashore and hundreds of whales leave the warm waters near Mexico to the cooler water of the Pacific Northwest.\u00a0<\/p>\n Rice also said the gray whale population has been dwindling along the West Coast over the last decade, according to Rice. Ten years ago, it had a population of 26,000. Now it’s down to 13,000.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Another whale has washed ashore along the Oregon Coast over the weekend. This time, a 40-foot, 19-ton gray…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":584220,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[79,201],"class_list":{"0":"post-584219","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=584219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584219\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/584220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=584219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=584219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=584219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\u201cI know the Arctic is going through drastic changes in recent years and the food these whales are depending on are shifting, they are not finding enough to eat because of melting sea ice,\u201d said Rice.<\/p>\n