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“It was really, really skinny,” said Lisa Schlender, a marine mammal researcher and office manager for Olympia-based Cascadia Research Collective.
A team of Cascadia scientists returned to the scene of the stranding at low tide early Monday evening to examine the carcass and take samples to further define the cause of death.
This is not the same gray whale that was spotted numerous times in South Sound in March, including at the bottom of Budd Inlet, Schlender said.
“It’s smaller than the recent visitor,” she said.
The gray whale death is the first in Puget Sound during the 2010 spring migration of thousands of gray whales from their winter breeding grounds in Mexico to their summer feeding grounds in Alaska, noted Orca Network co-founder Howard Garrett.
“It’s not unusual for one or two gray whales to die in Puget Sound each spring,” he said.
Seven gray whales have been identified in the area from Edmonds to the north end of Whidbey Island, repeat visitors who break off their northern migration annually to feed and linger in Puget Sound, Garrett said.
Other individual gray whales have been reported swimming around other areas of Puget Sound, including South Sound.
About one-third to half of the gray whales spotted in South Sound in recent years have perished during their visit, according to biologists. Many of them are sickly, malnourished juvenile whales.
“They come in down there already stressed, and there just isn’t enough food to support them,” Garrett said. “They wander in and they don’t make it out.”
At maturity, gray whales are about 40 feet long and more than 30 tons. Instead of teeth, they have horny, elastic plates that hang from their upper jaw to form a sieve for filtering food, including planktonic crustaceans and baitfish.
The stranded whale at the upper end of Oakland Bay in Mason County died about 2:40 p.m. Sunday, Schlender said.
Likely a yearling, the whale has old, healed scars on its pectoral fins and fluke from a killer whale encounter. But the old wounds are not the cause of death, Cascadia Research biologist Annie Douglas said.
The public is encouraged to report marine mammal sightings by calling Cascadia Research at 360-943-7325.
John Dodge: 360-754-5444
jdodge@theolympian.com
