A massive humpback whale that crashed ashore on an Oregon beach after getting caught in a crab fishing gear will be euthanized, according to officials.
The huge mammal is still alive but is in deep distress as volunteers raced against time to save the 50-ton sea creature, which has become beached in San Marine. According to Oregon Live, the whale is a juvenile female, which is under three years old and is roughly 30 feet long.
“It’s a very sad, tragic situation,” Lisa Ballance of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University told Oregon Public Broadcasting on Monday. “There’s no way to spin this positively. I know the general public is heartbroken.”
Carrie Newell, a marine biologist at Whale Research Eco Excursions, called on the public to stay away from the site while experts tried to rescue the animal.
“The humpback is a wild animal and please, under no circumstances, approach the whale,” she said in a statement. “Not only is this endangering your life but it is also causing stress to the animal.
She and other volunteers attempted to use a harness to lift the whale and drag it back into the water, but their attempts were unsuccessful, according to OregonLive.
“Whales were designed to live in the water and a beached whale therefore is not bouyed up by the water so the internal organs are being compressed which is causing additional complications. This in itself can be life-threatening to the whale.”
Despite the efforts to save the whale, experts warned that it was unlikely to survive.
“It comes ashore for a reason, and the reason is that it can’t survive out at sea in the ocean,” Ballance said. “There’s really nothing that we can do to help this individual except give it some room.”
Ballance told the public broadcasting channel that scientists will perform a necropsy to determine the cause of death.
That will involve experts taking samples from the animal’s carcass, which she describes as being “extremely valuable to science.”
Newell says it is the third humpback whale to wash ashore in a little over a month. The massive mammals normally head south in the winter, in search of warmer waters near Mexico and Central America, where they mate and give birth.
Currently, there are an estimated 80,000 humpback whales left in the wild, according to the Endangered Species Coalition. Although many subspecies of humpback whales are still regarded as being endangered, their numbers have rebounded from a low point of just 10,000 to 15,000.
An average adult can grow up to 52 feet in length and can weigh between 30 and 50 tons.
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