Wednesday, March 25th, 2015 (Clynt Ridgell). NOAA and DOAG Division of Aquatics & Wildlife Conducting Necropsy on Beaked Whale

Guam – Department of Agriculture’s Division of Aquatics and Wildlife Biologist Brent Tibbatts is conducting a necropsy of the beaked whale that beached itself and died in Merizo on Monday. Tibbats and NOAA officials are trying to determine what may have caused the whale to become stranded and they are also trying to determine if reports that two other whales were stranded are true or not.

On Monday evening the Department of Agriculture towed the whale carcass to the Malesso Pier and loaded it for transport to a place where they could conduct a necropsy to determine cause of death. “Necropsy is looking at organs and parts of the whale to look for any signs of anything out of the normal. We removed the head of the whale we were able to get samples of many of the organs heart, liver, kidneys, gonads. A lot of different things, stomach contents, and those are going to be sent to a lab in Hawaii for analysis,” said Tibbatts.

The necropsy is being done with the help of NOAA and the whale parts will be sent to the Hawaii Pacific University which is contracted by NOAA for these types of analysis. Tibbats says it could take several months for results but he hopes the fact that these whales are very rare will bump it near the top of their priority list.

“Beaked whales in general are shy they don’t come close to shore they dive deep so they aren’t often encountered by people in boats or people in the water at all,” said Tibbatts. So how did this whale that has been found to dive as deep as ten thousand feet in the open ocean end up on Guam’s shores? “Really there’s a variety of reasons. Whales that come up in groups it’s not really known sometimes there are mass strandings of hundreds of whales in places and a lot of times nobody really knows. It can be diseases that affect certain parts of their body. There are some whales that seem to be affected by things like sonar in the water,” said Tibbatts adding, “There seems to be a link between sonar use and some whale stranding. I don’t know how solid the proof is but it seems to be pretty strong circumstantial evidence anyway but again for this one we have to completely wait and see just right now it would be total guess as to what the cause was.”

The military itself has admitted in it’s 2013 Mariana Islands Training and Testing Draft EIS/OEIS that “Sonar use during exercises involving the U.S. Navy has been identified as a contributing cause or factor in five specific mass stranding events.” The report further states that “These five mass stranding events resulted in about 40 known stranding deaths among cetaceans consisting mostly of beaked whales, with a potential causal link to sonar.”

Tibbats says two other Cuvier beaked whales have washed up on Guam’s shores in the past ten years. PNC has received reports from witnesses in the village of Malesso who say that on Monday there were a total of three whales that were stranded. However, witnesses say two of them were helped back out to see by local fishermen. Tibbats is asking for any witnesses to come forward so he can determine for sure if there were indeed two more whales that were stranded on Monday or if it was just the same whale that kept getting stranded.

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