Humpback beached near Delaware Seashore State Park

A nearly 31-foot-long and approximately 20,000-pound juvenile humpback whale washed ashore near Delaware Seashore State Park on March 12.

The female calf, which was likely just under a year old and whose stomach contents indicated that she was still nursing, was first spotted in the morning, drifting about two miles offshore from Hamilton Acres, said Suzanne Thurman, founder and director of the Marine Education, Research, and Rehabilitation Institute. Later that day, around 3:15 p.m., Lewes resident David Liemer said he was walking his dog on an empty Conquest Beach when the dead whale first floated into the surf zone. 

According to Thurman, high tides and turbulent seas prevented the response team from getting the carcass fully onto shore, so they came back at 7:30 the next morning, March 13, to finish. While it normally takes all day to get beached whales and other large marine mammals tethered and out of the water, it didn’t take quite as long for the calf, since she was on the smaller side, Thurman said.

“We were finally able to get a tether around the tail, and then get that hooked to the heavy equipment so they could pull it out of the water,” Thurman said. “At that point, they could get it up on the beach so we could do a necropsy and try to find out what happened to her.”

Initial examinations didn’t show anything “too distinct” on the carcass, though there were some signs of blunt force trauma behind the calf’s head, Thurman said. Marine mammals sometimes get hit by ships after they’ve died, so further analysis may reveal if that was the cause.

Otherwise, the carcass was “very clean,” with no obvious signs of injury, Thurman said. Individuals from the responding agencies, the MERR Institute and Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, collected samples for further testing.

“Hopefully that will shed a little light on whether there was anything else going on, such as illness or some other underlying condition,” Thurman said. “It’s a very interesting process to investigate a whale’s death and tell its story, but it’s also very tragic, especially with a young whale.