An enormous fin whale has been found washed up dead on a beach in the U.K., mere days after it was seen swimming off the coast.
The whale was discovered by local surfers on Fistral Beach in Cornwall at around 7 a.m. local time, having been stranded on the sand by the high tide.
The 52-foot-long whale was determined to be a juvenile fin whale. It’s unclear if the animal was still alive after it was beached. A similar-looking whale had been spotted swimming nearby days before, leading experts to suspect it was the same whale.
“We noticed what looked like a big, uncovered, gray rock but as the light got brighter, we could see it was a creature of some kind,” Rob Barber, surfer and director of the Newquay Activity Centre, told Sky News. “After we investigated, we found a 16-metre long [52-foot] whale.”
“It’s super sad obviously but it’s also phenomenally interesting.”
Fin whales are the second-largest species of whale in the world, growing up to 85 feet long at their largest. They are listed as “vulnerable” on the IUCN Red List of Endangered Species, and were heavily hunted during the whaling era, with 725,000 of the whales being killed in the Southern Hemisphere alone during the mid-1900s, according to NOAA.
Local authorities, including the Cornwall Wildlife Trust’s Marine Strandings Network, the Cornwall Marine Pathology Team from the Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme, and the Devon and Cornwall Police, rushed to the scene, cordoning off the area and urging bystanders to steer clear of the animal.
Experts who examined the whale’s corpse determined that it was very malnourished before it died.
“We are currently waiting for permission from the Council to be processed before we can start a post mortem,” Anthea Hawtrey-Collier, project officer for the Marine Strandings Network, said in a statement. “When whales like this die and strand on our beaches it’s a really good way to gather information about these animals and to understand more about the health of our seas.”
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This comes after another fin whale washed up in Cornwall in January this year. Hundreds of whales are found stranded on beaches around the world every year, with an “Unusual Mortality Event (UME)” being declared along North America’s west coast due to the large numbers of gray whales being found dead since 2019.
There have been a lot of whale strandings in recent years, including huge numbers in Tasmania and New Zealand,” Culum Brown, a professor of marine biology at Macquarie University in Australia, told Newsweek.
“It’s a very sad sight to see”A fin whale was discovered stranded at Fistral beach this morning. Anthea Hawtrey-Collier shares an update from the…
The exact cause of the animal’s death will be determined after a post-mortem has been completed. Samples of the whale are now being taken.
“Well what an amazing but also sad day,” Sharon Trew of the Cornwall Wildlife Trust and Marine Strandings Network, posted to Facebook alongside pictures of the behemoth. “This beautiful Juvenile Fin whale stranded on Fistral beach this morning. As part of the Cornwall Marine Pathology Team I had the privilege of helping gather vital samples for further investigation to help identify how this wonderful young whale died.”
Cornwall Council is now working with other authorities to organize the removal of the carcass to prevent the animal from being washed back out to sea and potentially posing a shipping hazard, which they have said is “an incredibly challenging and difficult operation requiring specialist machinery”, according to the BBC.
