Mostly voluntary effort to study dead whale part of federal network

The finely orchestrated effort that brought a dead, 42-foot-long whale to the beach at Fort De Soto Park this week and the quest to determine what killed it was part of a federally mandated program for stranded marine mammals.

Led by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists, a network of agencies and volunteers investigates strandings of marine mammals, including dolphins, whales, seals and sea lions.

Amendments in 1992 to the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act put NOAA in charge of a stranding network, dividing the country into five districts.

The Southeast District that covers from North Carolina through Texas and the Caribbean Sea generally investigates about 700 strandings a year, coordinator Blair Mase-Guthrie said.

Most are bottlenose dolphins followed by pygmy sperm whales, she said.

The district also had 18 strandings of large whales such as the Bryde's whale found bobbing in a shipping channel near Port Sutton on Sunday.

Most of the personnel who helped with Monday's necropsy of the whale were volunteers, and the largest expense was the $3,000 for a commercial towing company that spent eight hours hauling the carcass to Fort De Soto Park.

Even badly decomposed, the whale likely provided a trove of information for scientists who conducted the necropsy along with taking tissue samples and measurements.

"We don't know a lot about this species. It should give us a lot of information," Mase-Guthrie said.

A group of 30 to 40 Bryde's whale is sometimes seen near the Big Bend area of Florida.

The whale was probably killed 24 to 48 hours before it was found in Tampa Bay, meaning it had been dead two to three days before a crane hauled the bus-sized carcass a few final yards to shore.

Mase-Guthrie suspects it was hit by a ship.

But it was no fluke of tides that brought the dead whale into Tampa Bay. The body likely rode the bow of a large ship, slung over the bulbous protrusion at the front of modern ocean-going vessels, she said.

Decomposition will probably prevent scientists from telling whether the whale suffered from a disease or parasite infestation before it died. The necropsy did show it was lactating, so there could be an orphaned calf in the Gulf.

However there was not much milk, meaning it could have been near the end of feeding its offspring, Mase-Guthrie said.

The stranding network aims to do more than scratch an itch of scientific curiosity.

Whales and dolphins usually wind up on beaches because of disease, pollution or parasites. Learning how they die gives scientists insights about conditions in the ocean.

"Marine mammals are a sentinel species. They give us an idea of what's happening to the health of our bays," Mase-Guthrie said.