There’s a quest for answers along the Jersey coast after the discovery of yet another dead humpback whale.
“There seems to be more than an unusual number of humpback whales washing in,” Sheila Dean, director of the Marine Mammal Stranding Center, told NBC10.
A more than 30-foot humpback whale was found Saturday morning in Atlantic City. It was the third whale to wash up in New Jersey in less than a month and the second one in Atlantic City.
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Tissue samples from the latest whale were collected over the weekend. Experts will undergo pathology tests to figure out why the whale died. Members of Brigantine’s Marine Mammal Stranding Center along with the Long Island-based non-profit Atlantic Marine Conservation Society are taking part in the investigation.
The whale that was discovered on Saturday was ultimately buried in the sand. Experts said they have nothing conclusive in regards to a cause of death but did find bruising on the massive marine mammal.
“It appears to have some evidence of human induced mortality like a vessel strike or something like that,” Rob DiGiovanni, of the Atlantic Marine Conservation Society, told NBC10.
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Other dead whales have also turned up in coastal areas of New Jersey and New York. Scientists say there has been an increase in whale sightings closer to the coast over the past several years.
“That also happened to coincide with an increase in the number of animals that we’ve seen washing up on our shores,” DiGiovanni said.
Environmental advocates and other groups want to know if offshore work related to planned ocean wind farms has anything to do with the whale deaths. In a letter, they called on President Joe Biden to launch an investigation.
“The key for that investigation are two things,” Cindy Zipf, the executive director of Clean Ocean Action, said. “One is that there’s oversight by an independent team of scientific experts and that number two, it’s public and transparent.”
Dean, meanwhile, named multiple possible causes for the deaths.
“I mean, there’s sonar. There’s military sonar,” she said. “There’s fishing nets. Plastic pollution. There’s so much going on in the ocean.”
Experts said it could take a couple months to get pathology results on samples taken from the whale that was found over the weekend in Atlantic City. They also stressed that there’s always the possibility that they’ll never get definitive answers.
