A post-mortem examination of a whale that stranded on Long Beach Island in New Jersey found that the animal had suffered numerous blunt force injuries, including a fractured skull and vertebrae.
The Marine Mammal Stranding Center on Friday released observations from a necropsy performed Thursday evening on a nearly 25-foot-long (7.6-meter-long) juvenile male humpback whale that was found dead in Long Beach Township.
Sheila Dean, director of the center, said the whale had bruises around its head; multiple fractures of the skull and cervical vertebrae; numerous dislocated ribs and a dislocated shoulder.
“These injuries are consistent with blunt force trauma,” he wrote in a post on the group’s Facebook page.
Reached later, Dean did not attribute the injuries to any particular cause, stressing that extensive testing remains to be carried out as part of the necropsy, with tissue samples sent to laboratories across the country.
“We only report what we see,” he said.
The cause of the animal’s death is of great interest to many amid an ongoing controversy involving the belief by opponents of offshore wind energy that site preparation work for the projects is harming or killing whales along the east coast of the United States.
Numerous scientific agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; the Marine Mammal Commission; the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection say there is no evidence linking offshore wind preparations to whale deaths.
NOAA said Friday that there were 16 large whale deaths on the East Coast in 2024: 7 humpbacks between Massachusetts and North Carolina; 4 critically endangered North Atlantic right whales in Massachusetts, Virginia and Georgia; two sperm whales in South Carolina and Florida; two minke whales in North Carolina and Virginia and one fin whale in Rhode Island.
In 2023, there were 82 large whale deaths along the East Coast, the agency said.
The stranding center’s website says this was the first whale death of the year in New Jersey, after 2023.
Leading Light Wind is one of three proposed wind farms off the coast of New Jersey. A statement released late Thursday said “our community should protect itself from misinformation campaigns in response to these incidents,” noting that many previous whale deaths have been attributed by scientists to vessel strikes or entanglement with fishing gear.
Protect Our Coast NJ, one of the most staunchly anti-offshore wind groups, expressed renewed skepticism toward official claims about whale deaths, citing a similar distrust in some quarters of official information regarding the COVID-19 pandemic .
“Blaming all cetacean deaths on ship accidents and incidents is reminiscent of the phenomenon from four years ago where seemingly every death was a Covid death, no matter how old or how ill the patient was before contracting the virus,” the group said. in a statement Thursday.
Leading Light, whose project would be built about 40 miles (64 kilometers) off Long Beach Island, said it is committed to building the project in a way that minimizes risks to wildlife.
“Minimizing the impact on the marine environment is of the utmost importance to Leading Light Wind,” project leaders said. “In addition to providing advance warning of our survey activity and facilitating active involvement of maritime industry stakeholders, Leading Light Wind is investing in monitoring and mitigation initiatives to ensure the offshore wind industry can thrive alongside a healthy marine environment ”.
Post-mortem examination of the whale also showed evidence of previous entanglements with fishing gear, although none were present when the whale ran aground. Scars from a previous entanglement unrelated to the stranding event were found around the peduncle, which is the muscular area where the tail connects to the body; on the tail itself and on the right front pectoral fin.