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Officials from the Zoological Society of London have completed necropsies on three of the whales in an attempt to determine what caused five members of the same pod to die in quick succession.

“Their stomachs were empty and the indications are the whales came into the North Sea by mistake and the water was too shallow to feed,” a ZSL official told the Skegness Standard. They all appear to be young males, he added.

The latest carcass is proving the trickiest to handle as it washed up on former Ministry of Defence land that was once the site of a bombing range, the BBC reported. The coastguard urged people to stay away from the “currently inaccessible” area.

“There is no public access to the area and it is extremely dangerous with tidal creeks and the potential for unexploded ordinance,” Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust said according to the BBC. “Many of the lanes to the marshes are private and not accessible.”

The coastguard is also asking people to stay away from the Skegness whales after they were spray-painted with graffiti.

“Mans (sic) fault,” one tail reads. “Fukushima” was scrawled in white paint across another carcass.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament told the BBC that the national organization was not responsible for writing “CND” under a peace sign on the whale’s tale.

During one of the autopsies on Monday, a “huge blast of air” escaped from one of the Skegness whales, according to a BBC reporter.

Some U.K. media have taken to calling this an “explosion,” but it could have been a lot worse. Two years ago, a whale that washed up on the Faroe Islands sprayed blood and guts in the face of a marine biologist.

The gut-busting reaction came after a buildup of gases, specifically methane, caused by the putrefaction process.

With a file from National Post staff