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Metropolis Reality Forums « Whale Dies After Short Trip to New York »

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Whale Dies After Short Trip to New York
« on: Apr 20th, 2007, 8:04am »		 Quote Quote Modify Modify
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/19/nyregion/19whale.html?ref=nyregion
 
A 12-foot-long whale that had surfaced and frolicked near the mouth of the Gowanus Canal on Tuesday, delighting and surprising even the most hardened of Brooklyn residents, died yesterday, officials said.
 
The whale — a minke, the second-smallest whale species — had been thought to be in good health because it was not surfacing erratically. Like other ocean mammals, whales must surface to breathe.
 
Shortly before 5 p.m., during low tide, it was seen churning in the water. Teri Frady, a spokeswoman for the Fisheries Service of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said, “It swam by a bulkhead” near the canal’s mouth, “thrashed a little, and then expired.” Neither its age nor sex were known.
 
Earlier in the day, biologists speculated that the whale might have followed krill or another food source into the Gowanus Canal, whose polluted waters have cleared somewhat in recent years.
 
Kim Durham, the rescue program director for the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation, which arranges for rescues of dolphins and other sea animals, said the dying whale apparently beached itself after hitting rocks near a Hess oil refinery.
 
Ms. Durham said she received an urgent phone call from researchers at the scene. “ ‘Kim, there’s a lot of splashing going on across the waterway,’ ” Ms. Durham recalled the researchers saying. “ ‘We’re going to check it out.’ Our team got on scene and the animal was dead.”
 
The Riverhead team secured the whale’s carcass with ropes so it would not float out to sea, Ms. Durham said.
 
The Army Corps of Engineers is scheduled to transport the carcass, which weighs several tons, to its Caven Point center in New Jersey, across from Liberty Island. A necropsy is scheduled for today, Ms. Durham said.
 
Word of the whale’s death reached Ms. Frady minutes after in a telephone interview in which she described the difficulties of rescuing an ill or hungry animal the size of a whale.
 
“The animal’s not going to sit there and let you net it,” she said.
 
Big nets might pull human rescuers into the water, Ms. Frady said. A flotilla of boats might not be able to coax the whale back to sea. And if the whale is sick, the trauma of the rescue attempt may hasten its death, Ms. Frady said.
 
A minke (pronounced MINK-ee) is the smallest of the whales, except for the pygmy whales, according to Diana Reiss, a senior research scientist at the New York Aquarium.
 
The largest whale, the blue whale, can reach 100 feet and weigh more than 100 tons. The minke is a fast-swimming and inquisitive species, and adult males can reach 26 feet and females 33 feet.
 
For two days, the whale had been an object of admiration. Parents brought small children, whale watchers brought binoculars and photographers brought long lenses to the areas overlooking the canal.
 
Debra Clarke, 36, an apartment and office organizer, arrived in the early evening yesterday only to learn of the whale’s death.
 
“We just came hoping for good news,” she said, noting that she and her friends had spent most of the day watching broadcast news of the Virginia Tech massacre. “After Virginia, you come here rooting for the whale. You hope that something good has to happen, because it turns out these are days for tears.”
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