A killer whale died after stranding itself on a Florida beach, becoming the first orca to have done so in the southeast.
Members of the public reported the beached whale early on Wednesday morning in Palm Coast, which is roughly 30 miles north of Daytona Beach.
“This is the first killer whale stranding in the Southeast US, so there’s a lot of interest, obviously, in trying to sample it extensively and try to determine why it might have been sick and why it stranded,” Erin Fougeres, the Marine Mammal Stranding Program administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southeast Region told CNN.
The killer whale was alive when it was discovered, however, it was sadly deceased by the time help arrived.
“We have veterinarians and very skilled biologists and pathologists who will be on scene to conduct the necropsy of the animal,” Fougeres said. “They’ll open up the whale and they’ll go through every organ system and look to observe if there’s any gross lesions, anything obviously wrong with the different organ systems, and they’ll take extensive samples from the whale, which will then send out to a lab, or multiple labs actually for analysis.”
Hopefully the necropsy will reveal how the orca ended up stranded and give some answers to this sad and unprecedented situation,
“Killer whales in the Western North Atlantic, we really don’t know much about them, and in U.S. waters, they’re characterized as uncommon or rare in those waters, although there are about 14,000 whales in the broader North Atlantic ranging from Canada over to the Faroe Islands (north of Europe),” she continued. “We know they’re out there, but they’re very rare in our waters.”