SONOMA COUNTY (KRON) — The carcass of a 28-foot gray whale is too decomposed to determine why it became stranded on Portuguese Beach on the Sonoma Coast on Sunday.
“It will remain unknown why it was stranded,” said Dr. Shawn Johnson, director of veterinary science at the Marine Mammal Center in the Marin Headlands.
The sector superintendent of the State parks, Mike Lair, said that environmental scientists have looks over the whale and provided a few options of what to do with the whale.
One option is towing the whale out to see. Others include burying the whale or letting the tide return it to sea.
“It’s going to be tide-dependent. It got washed up, so we know the water was that high. It’s just a matter of how big the tides are,” Lair said.
Lair went on to say that if the whale starts to rot, it won’t stay on the beach.
Several whale strandings have been reported in the region since last month, including two in Pacifica and one in Half Moon Bay.
“This is not an elevated number of strandings,” Johnson said.
It is not uncommon for dead whales to wash ashore during the spring whale migration from breeding grounds in Mexico to feeding grounds near Alaska, Johnson said.
Calves can be separated from whale pods during the migration and be attacked by killer whales or struck by ships, Johnson said.
The Marine Mammal Center took tissue samples from the juvenile gray whale on Portuguese Beach for future study, not to determine the cause of death, according to Johnson.
The California Academy of Sciences conducts necropsies of intact whales, Johnson said.