Goose-beaked whales<\/a> are found in deep offshore waters in most oceans and seas worldwide, but their migration patterns still aren\u2019t known. They\u2019re the deepest and longest-diving mammal in the world, capable of diving at least 3,300 feet for 20 to 40 minutes to feed on cephalopods like squid and octopus. The deepest known dive for a goose-beaked whale was nearly 2 miles and the longest known dive lasted 222 minutes, according to NOAA.<\/p>\n\u201cIt\u2019s sort of a very unusual thing for a beaked whale to wash up, because they live offshore and they\u2019re deep divers,\u201d Wild said. \u201cSo for it to have somehow floated in, the currents must be quite interesting there for it to have gotten into that cove.\u201d<\/p>\n
Beaked whales use echolocation for navigation and foraging, and are particularly sensitive to underwater sounds.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re typically the species of whale that is associated with Navy sonar,\u201d Wild said. \u201cSo when you hear about mass strandings, often those have been beaked whales.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Kruzof stranding wasn\u2019t the only one this summer. A second beaked whale was found beached in Yakutat in early June. Wild said this is rare. Previously, only two were reported in the area in the past 40 years.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt would be great to see it alive, but it\u2019s cool to [have] a specimen wash up dead, because you can kind of poke into it a little bit more and learn more about it,\u201d Wild said.<\/p>\n
Wild put a small response team together and returned to the stranding site two days later to perform a partial necropsy, or animal autopsy, on the mother. She said they were able to retrieve the head, get skin and blubber samples for genetics and hormone testing, and fecal samples to test for harmful algal blooms. They also looked in the whale\u2019s stomach, which was full of squid beaks, meaning she likely didn\u2019t starve to death.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe weren\u2019t able to definitively say what the cause of death was, unfortunately,\u201d Wild said. \u201cBecause the carcass was in kind of a moderate decomposition stage, we weren\u2019t really able to get all the things that we would want to get that might help us understand cause of death.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wild said if the whale had been more intact, they would have investigated the whale\u2019s brain to look for signs of barotrauma, widely known as \u201cthe bends,\u201d from coming back up to the surface too quickly. They also would have wanted to look at her bones, blubber, and muscle for any signs of blunt force trauma that could have contributed to her death.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery piece of a whale is a puzzle piece to sort of put together what its life looked like,\u201d Wild said. \u201cI can\u2019t say right now that we will never know [the cause of death], but we\u2019ll see.\u201d<\/p>\n
They brought the whale\u2019s head back to town with them to freeze and use for education purposes in the future. Wild said while she had hoped they could retrieve more, she\u2019s grateful they got the opportunity to do the necropsy at all.<\/p>\n
\u201cBeaked whales are so poorly understood \u2014 exactly what they\u2019re doing and what they\u2019re eating, and all the different life history parameters that are so difficult to study on these really seldom seen offshore deep diving species,\u201d she said. \u201cSo I mostly just think it\u2019s a cool experience to be able to have been able to get what we did.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wild said they scanned the fetus at the local hospital on June 25. And she said they plan to perform a public necropsy on the fetus at Sitka Whalefest<\/a> this fall, which could shed light on what caused them to wash ashore on a remote Southeast Alaska island.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ellie Schmidt and a few of her friends were camping at Fred\u2019s Creek Cabin on Kruzof Island in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":738510,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[79,201],"class_list":["post-738509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738509","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=738509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738509\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/738510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=738509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=738509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=738509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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