MENDOCINO CO., 9/17/24 — A team of researchers armed with long knives, scalpels, and other surgical instruments descended on 10 Mile Beach north of Fort Bragg Monday. A juvenile female fin whale, measuring 40 feet in length, had washed up on the beach. Before the team from the Marine Mammal Center in Marin County began its cutting and measuring and sampling, intestines were seen 30 yards south of the carcass while blubber was found 30 yards north. She was likely killed when hit by a ship, the leading unnatural cause of death among fin whales.

“The preliminary cause of death for this whale is ship-strike blunt force trauma. She was in excellent body condition and had no evidence of preexisting illness,” said veterinarian Pádraig Duignan, director of pathology at the Marine Mammal Center. 

Fin whales can live more than 100 years and aren’t fully mature until age 25 or more. They are the second largest animal on earth, following their distant cousin the blue whale.

The carcass had much to teach scientists, The Marine Mammal Center team conducted a full necropsy, working in ankle-splashing water in the early afternoon and on the beach until dark, as the tide continued to go out. One scientist said this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study a recently deceased great whale. The carcass had not begun to stink but horrid smells emerged as they opened up the dead mammal. Volunteers from the Noyo Center for Marine Science helped with the fast-paced study, with some people cutting and others taking pictures or sampling.

The word was soon out on social media, and people arrived throughout the day to photograph the scene. Several set up chairs on the bluffs to watch the fascinating work. On another bluff, eight vultures in a row watched, waiting their turn, while others circled above.

Some were horrified by the sight. Scott Taubold of Fort Bragg came upon the necropsy during his morning bike ride. He went home sad, saying he couldn’t even bring himself to take a photo of the dead whale and the researchers.

Whales stay with their mother for up to two years. Although this whale was barely bigger than a “toddler”-aged fin whale, consider this whale more like a teenager. “She was a juvenile animal and not likely dependent on her mother any longer,” Duignan said.

Much has been learned in recent years about fin whales, which were hunted from estimated highs near a half million individuals down to less than a fifteenth of that total, with numbers remaining high only in the Southern Ocean. They migrate toward both poles in the summer and toward the equator in winter. They tend to group in mid-ocean breeding grounds, a behavior that is still being studied. Scientists have found that trimmer male fin whales sometimes outswim heavier blue whales and breed with female blues in the breeding season, creating a hybrid species.

Their songs have become a scientific sensation in recent years with many trying to understand single-note repeating articulations. They and blue whales make the lowest frequency sound of any animal on earth.  Full-blood fin whales can be distinguished by their dorsal fin (hence the name), which is shared by their only other cousin, Bryde’s whales, which are not found off California. Their most obvious feature is their two-color body and head, with alternating patterns of gray and white. Scientists were cutting and bagging the uniquely dazzling white baleen on Monday afternoon. 

The fin whale is listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act and depleted under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. This is primarily because of the low population numbers in the Atlantic Ocean off the eastern United States, where it has been intensively studied. The population numbers have not been studied as much off the West Coast, where it is believed to be doing better.

The fin whale population today is estimated to be 14,620 to 18,630 in the North Pacific; 3,590 to 6,300 in the western North Atlantic; 10,500 in the eastern North Atlantic; and 85,200 in the Southern Ocean. Fin whales’ habit of mass feeding on krill in the Southern Ocean has created conflicts with the fishing industry. Japan announced this summer that its whalers plan to hunt fin whales again in the Southern Ocean, creating outrage in the world environmental community. Greenpeace activists on ships battled Japanese whalers for decades, in addition to whalers from Norway and Iceland, the only other two countries still whaling. Whaling caused many whale species to go extinct and all others to be pushed to the brink before whaling began to be heavily regulated in 1946 until almost all whaling stopped in 1986.

Ship strikes are the number one cause of fin whale premature deaths worldwide, according to scientific studies. Fin whales are uncommonly seen along the Mendocino Coast, while gray whales create an annual show in March and December as they wend their way back and forth from their Baja breeding grounds to their Arctic feeding grounds. No other whale species have predictable or near-shore routes. Gray whales top out at about 40 feet, the size of the young fin whale that washed up. Fin whales can reach 80 feet when mature. Blue whales can occasionally be seen, along with more common but unpredictable humpback whale sightings. Before 2005, there were rumors of orcas but no confirmed sightings. Then an orca pod started taking regular trips south, and orcas are seen every year by a few lucky people who happen to be looking when that one tribe of killer whales is passing. A sperm whale, the third largest whale, washed up on the Mendocino Coast two years ago. Sperm whales, the only predator whale among the great whales, are very rare in this part of the world.

The Marine Mammal Center usually sends out teams when marine mammals are alive but stressed or beached. Seals and otters are taken to their headquarters in Marin County for veterinary care. Assistance in getting back into the water is sometimes rendered for larger animals such as sea lions. Since 1975, the center has rescued more than 24,000 marine mammals along 600 miles of California coastline and the Big Island of Hawaii, according to its website. With a volunteer force numbering more than 1,400 and a strong donor base, the center is able to respond to marine mammals in distress. 

Duignan said he had heard of another young fin whale washing up this year in Southern California. “The Marine Mammal Center  has been doing whale necropsy response for almost 50 years so we have definitely done fin and blue necropsies before,” Duignan added. The scientists left little of the whale behind, but people continued to come to the beach until dark on Tuesday. It is a federal crime to remove the body parts of an endangered species.

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FORT BRAGG., 3/17/24 —More than 750 runners and walkers filled Fort Bragg’s Coastal Trail on Saturday, with competitive 5k and 10k races plus many people doing fun walk/runs and even a kiddie race to start the day. The Rotary Club’s Beer Festival attracted a big crowd for live music and tasting of beers and ciders from more than a dozen craft beer makers. It was one of the best turnouts of brewers ever and a complete comeback from cancellations during the pandemic. Skunk Train expeditions were packed. Organizers of the events were thrilled to see that after the pandemic ended all the fun for two years, people have finally come back. Locals found traffic backups from Noyo Harbor to Pudding Creek that equaled those of the two biggest traditional events in Fort Bragg, the World’s Largest Salmon Barbecue on the first Saturday in July and the Paul Bunyan Days on Labor Day weekend.

The beer festival was held in the same historic place it had been for years, the old Eagles Hall-Comrades Hall, Socialist Hall, Union Hall building on Corry Street in Fort Bragg. That building was purchased as a private residence in 2022 by Miranda and Stathi Pappas. The family lives upstairs and offers community groups the auditorium with its stage and famous madrone floors. Miranda Pappas said their two kids have the greatest fun room ever when the hall is not being used for events.

The Mendocino coast’s month-long party celebrating whales comes to an end Sunday. Events on Sunday include more activities from the Noyo Center for Marine Science. The Noyo Center has three locations in Fort Bragg and Noyo Harbor where people can see whale skeletons and listen to informative presentations. The Noyo Center recently told the Fort Bragg City Council they hope to break ground on their “La-Bone-atory,”  a large warehouse building to be constructed in the vicinity of the old airplane runway once operated by Georgia Pacific. That building is designed to house the prized blue whale skeleton that locals helped remove after the 73-foot female blue  whale was struck and killed by a scientific research ship in 2009. The bones were buried and the Noyo Center has been planning reconstruction ever since. The center hopes to break ground on the new building this year.

The council also heard about aquaculture the Noyo Center is involved in or planning. A program to brood abalone is being developed with the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians and UC Davis. The Noyo Center and Noyo Harbor District are also working with scientists on an aquaculture plan to turn purple urchins into a food source.

There is a book signing on Sunday and more chances to take tours and ask questions about the still emerging plans and a plethora of other educational and research activities. https://noyocenter.org/

Since Sunday is St. Patrick’s Day, some of the last day’s events are shamrock-themed. The Skunk Train continues its Leprechaun’s Locomotive event with 11:30 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. departures. The Fort Bragg-Mendocino Lions Club offers takeout and dine-in dinners at Lions Hall on Redwood Street in Fort Bragg beginning at 11:30 a.m.

As usual, the guests of honor are rarely seen at the whale festivals, except by the many people who took one of Fort Bragg’s party boats out to sea. Party boaters reported whales approaching the boats and lots of views of the sometimes playful beasts that are as big or bigger than a full-size big city bus. The boats are forbidden from approaching the whales, so it’s all up to the cetaceans how close they come to excited watchers.

And there is another reason to celebrate: After a terrifying 30 percent drop in Eastern Pacific Gray Whale numbers since 2017, scientists believe the die-offs are over. 

Whale Lore

There are four kinds of whales commonly seen off the Mendocino coast: gray whales, humpbacks, blue whales and killer whales, which are actually dolphins. While this is not prime viewing season for the other three less often seen types, gray whales are in the midst of their migration from Baja to Alaskan waters. 

A study published in Science magazine blames climate change for the massive starvations seen in the last few years. The premise is that once dependable Arctic waters have become unpredictable in terms of food populations and the extent of ice.

Gray whales do something no other whale appears to do, which is to follow a coastal migration route every year. Their predictability and approachability resulted in them being hunted to extinction by men in wooden ships first on the eastern side of the Atlantic Ocean and then on the New World side. The Western Pacific Gray Whale was hunted into what was believed to be extinction by the 20th century and the Eastern Pacific Gray Whale was on the verge before hunting was halted in the 1940s. After the passage of the Marine Mammal Act, the gray whale population came back to nearly 15,000 by the 1960s, then continued to grow and stayed between 20,000 and 25,000 between from the 1990s until the die-off that began in 2017 and is believed now at an end.

The best time to see whales off the Mendocino coast is March, when the majority of gray whales are headed north from their birthing and playing grounds in the warm waters off Baja to their ice-cold feeding waters off Alaska. April is when cow-calf pairs are often seen on their way north. A small number of iconoclastic individual cetaceans may actually be headed south just when everybody else is headed north, scientists say.

Most whales leave Alaska waters in the fall, although some dawdle until December in high latitudes. They stay two to three months in the warm Baja waters, most leaving to head back north from January to March. Some whales migrate only a short distance, and some go from Baja all the way through the Bering Straits to the Arctic Sea. The gray whales’ trip, up to 15,000 miles, is called the longest known migration for any mammal.

Because of the high cliffs along the Northern California coast and the predictable nearshore migration of grays, the Mendocino coast is considered one of the best spots to watch whales. It can be done year-round, not just during the whale festival’s prime month for viewing. Seen from shore, gray whales can be distinguished from humpback whales by their heart-shaped spout and their lack of a dorsal fin.

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