Wildlife Team Examines Whale on Holiday Isle

It’s been a busy couple of months for the Emerald Coast Wildlife Refuge’s Marine Stranding Team. In early November, a 17-foot bryde’s whale beached itself in Walton County. A week later, a dolphin was found floating dead in the waters around Joe’s Bayou.

This time it was a 10-foot pygmy sperm whale that had beached itself on Holiday Isle Thursday morning. Amanda Wilkerson, executive director of the Emerald Coast Wildlife Refuge, said the whale, estimate to be an adult or close to an adult, was dead when the team arrived on the scene late Thursday morning. “When we got there to do the necropsy, the poor thing was still warm,” she said. “We think it probably beached itself at night and died in the early morning.”

Wilkerson said the 1,000-pound whale showed no signs of human interaction but “definitely had a lot of parasites.” The direct cause of death will not be known until tests are run on samples of the animal’s blood and organs sent to a National Marine Fisheries Service laboratory.

Wilkerson said these types of whales are usually “mass stranders” and encourages anyone walking along the beach who sees anything unusual in the water to contact the refuge. “We want to be able to help them as soon as possible,” she said. “With these types of whales, where there’s one, there’s eight. This one just left the pod to beach itself.”

Pygmy sperm whales, Wilkerson said, are deepwater whales who ordinarily only come into shallow waters to beach themselves.

Published on Friday, January 12, 2007