Not Having a Whale of a Time

The week before last a rather dead and bloated male humpback washed up on to Rainbow Beach near Bonny Hills and we had to bury it quickly with a giant excavator.
It was around 9.3 metres long and the hole it went it was about 4 m deep . We heard about it the day before it washed ashore from the Volunteer Sea Rescue as it posed a navigational hazard.

The poor animal was likely a 2 year old (humpbacks have a very uniform growth rate) and it had a rope from a lobster pot wrapped around it's tail to the extent that one side of the fluke was almost completely amputated. It is highly probable that it collected this entanglement from it's migration south last year. Then it swam all the way to Antartica with it and has attempted it's northward migration this year.

The poor animal had a heavy burden of whale lice (which are actually not lice at all but a type of crustacean that whales carry but usually not that many), indicating ill health. The animal also unusually had goose and acorn barnacles on both the ventral and dorsal surface of the body again indicating very poor health.

The lower jaw and tongue was missing from the animal and it may have been attacked and killed by orccas when it was close to death as orccas often use this modus operandi on ailing sea beasts.

It was a very sad tale - but the lesson is if you see an entangled whale stay with it and contact the authorities (in NSW it's the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service) and we can get out and try to disentangle the animal so this type of slow angonising death doesn't occur. If you leave the animal it may never be found again (it's a big ocean).

Given the increase in the population of humpbackwhales plying the eastern and western seaboards (maybe 7,500 in the east) we are sadly likely to see an increasing incidence in this type of human impact on whales.

Aside from the whale I've been away networking with the Rural Fire Service; worked on the first wildfire of this year on the first day of winter (!!!! it's so dry!!!!) and had a godawful cold that I have just started to shake with the help of Chinese herbs. I'm off to Sydney tomorrow for the Women in Firefighting Conference. So my next post maybe another couple of weeks off. Mmm we'll see.