The humpback whale was first seen on Monday morning, swimming freely in the Thames. Finding humpback whales stranded on UK shores, let alone in the Thames is a very rare occurrence. Therefore, discovering the whale’s body floating lifelessly days later held a big resonance with the public, who had lovingly named the whale Hessy.
The Cetacean Strandings Investigation Project (CSIP) of the Zoological Society of London worked with the Port of London Authority on three ships to move the carcass six miles to the next port, which took the team a total of four hours.
A post-mortem is being conducted to examine the reason of death and why the whale entered the river in the first place. So far, they have discovered the humpback whale to be a 10-meter-long juvenile female. A large wound on the underside of her head had left her with a broken mandibula. It “was most likely the result of a ship strike and this is considered to be the primary cause of death”. Therefore, theories that had hinted at starvation as a possible cause are still plausible since there was no evidence of recent feeding and the female was “nutritionally compromised”. All that was made worse by a heavy burden of parasites in her intestine. Further evidence of past interactions with human activity are linear scars on her dorsal fins and tail flukes which strongly suggest historical entanglement.
Hessy’s death adds to the count of five humpback whales that have been stranded on UK shores in 2019 so far - a big increase from the usual one or two occurring per year. This coincides with the report on rising stranding numbers in the UK as we have covered here.
For more information on Hessy, read: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/dead-humpback-whale-hessy-struck-20546722
The post-mortem report can be read here: https://www.facebook.com/UKCSIP/posts/
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