Orca’s severed dorsal fin found on Washington beach
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Orca’s severed dorsal fin found on Washington beach
B.C. scientists assume whale is dead, but debate the cause
By Ethan Baron
Vancouver Province
Monday, May 28, 2007
An orca fin that was discovered on a Washington state beach.
CREDIT:
An orca fin that was discovered on a Washington state beach.
A mysterious discovery on a Washington beach has B.C. scientists at odds over what happened to a grandmother orca.
Rangers at Twin Harbors State Park found the animal’s dorsal fin sticking up out of the sand.
“It does appear to have been cut, by a knife most likely,” said Jessie Huggins, a coordinator with Cascadia Research, which collected the fin at the park. “It does not look like a propeller injury.
“It’s very, very unusual. We’re all pretty baffled at this point.
“One of the things that could possibly have happened is it was some sort of fisheries interaction and they cut it out of a net, but we don’t have any way of confirming that.”
But here in B.C., federal fisheries researcher Graeme Ellis looked at photos of the fin a few days after it was found on May 22, and concluded a ship-impact was the likeliest explanation for the 54-kilogram disembodied dorsal.
“She may have been dead and been struck by a ship,” Ellis said. “It’s something that could happen by being struck by a propeller.”
An orca might survive the loss of a dorsal fin, but in this case there was so much tissue attached to the fin that the whale is certainly dead, he said.
Matching photos of the fin to whale photos, Ellis identified the orca as T086, a female known to have birthed one calf, which in turn had two offspring.
She was a “transient” orca, a type of killer whale that roams off the west coast of North America. T086 was likely 35 to 65 years old, Ellis said.
Female orcas live around 50 years on average, so it’s possible T086 died of natural causes, Ellis said.
Last week, a dead orca was discovered in Nootka Sound off Vancouver Island, but that one was described by a Vancouver Aquarium official as a “sub-adult”.
E-mail reporter Ethan Baron at ebaron@png.canwest.com
© Vancouver Province 2007
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