A dead pygmy sperm whale washed up on Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula last week, and one conservationist says the animal was still able to mount some kind of inky defense.
According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, this species is usually found in temperate and tropical seas. It has a square head and only the lower row of sharp, curved teeth.
Julie Huntington of the group Whale Release and Strandings said seeing a pygmy sperm whale off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador is extremely rare.
“This is the third project we’ve worked on in the last 40 years,” she told CBC News.
Huntington and her colleagues, Cateline Landry and Maria Peddle, performed a necropsy on the beached animal at Portugal Cove South to gather information about the cause of death.
Huntington said the whale’s large intestine contains a lot of thick, tarry ink, which she believes is a natural defense mechanism for the animal.
“It will exude — it will push out — and it will create a cloud in the water,” she said. “If a shark is following it or something else that might be hunting it, the animal can escape.”
She also approached this element while cutting into the whale’s body.
“We opened that bag … and it consumed us,” Huntington said.
Huntington said they became covered in a thick, black substance and had to cleanse themselves in the ocean.
“Half an hour later we looked at the waves and saw they were still in the water,” she said.
Sampling
When the whale washed ashore near Mistaken Point Ecological Reserve, Huntington said, her organization was contacted by translator Lukas Ward, who described the animal and sent a photo of it.
On the beach, she said, a pygmy sperm whale was weighed and measured, and samples were taken, including teeth, which were given to scientists from Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
“With teeth, you can tell the age of an animal and learn a little bit more about its health over time,” she said.
She said little is known yet about the whale and how it died.
“He had quite a bit of damage to his head that could have been sustained from going into the water because there were rocks right off the shore,” Huntington said.
“These are not animals that want to show themselves. And when they do come ashore, they do it for a reason.”
During the autopsy, she said, she noticed the jaw was broken, adding that this may have been why the animal wanted to come ashore.
His stomach was empty, she said, which isn’t necessarily unusual, since sperm whales regurgitate food when they come ashore. But she said there was nothing in his small intestine.
Huntington also believes someone came across a pygmy sperm whale on the beach and tried to release it back into the ocean, something she advises people against doing. She said that while people believe they are doing a good deed, the mammal is not necessarily washed ashore.
“It’s really not recommended for people to try to put them back in the water,” she said, adding that it’s possible to injure the animal by dragging it along the ground.
After an autopsy was performed, she said, the whale’s body was left on the beach where it would be thrown into the ocean and become food for other animals.
“There is a huge cycle of life [feeding] “They are bottom dwellers that live on whales and are an important part of the ocean life cycle,” she said.
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