A young sperm whale thought to be less than three years old was washed up on the Welsh coast in Gwynedd last week. Though the 6.7 m meter long juvenile had been stranded alive, it died before any help could arrive.
While the stranding toll has seen a sharp rise in the UK this year, it is the first-ever sperm whale to be stranded on the Welsh coast since the start of record in 1913. This highlights the “very unusual nature” of the stranding event. The young whale is thought to originate from the matriarchal ponds with warm water in the South of the UK.
The first examination concluded the whale to be in moderate-poor nutritional condition with muscle wastage along the dorsal flank. A lack of teeth development suggests that it was still surviving on milk from its mother. The necropsy by the Cetacean Stranding Investigation Programme (CSIP) revealed no evidence of recent feeding, though numerous squid beaks in its stomach indicate it had been weaned in the past. Further contents found in its stomach were blue plastic sheeting, a relatively large mass of ropes and fragments of monofilament line. Latter appeared to have been ingested a longer time ago while the plastic sheet seemed more recent. However, it is important to note “that the marine debris had not caused an impaction and a large part of the fundic stomach was unaffected”. Furthermore, evidence of small brain damage has been found which might have played a significant factor in the juvenile’s loss of orientation.
Though the ingestion itself was certainly not the direct reason for its death, the examiners could not accurately assess whether the ingested debris might be the reason that the whale ended up in shallow water. Deep diving, baleen species might be more at risk for debris ingestion “due to their feeding ecology and higher rates of debris in submarine canyons”. Thus, CSIP highlights this as another sad finding to call attention to the global issue of marine debris.
Their full report can be read here: https://www.facebook.com/UKCSIP/posts/3192058730836408?__tn__=K-R
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