By Jenny Neyman
Photos courtesy of Brent Johnson. A female, juvenile humpback whale, showing signs of killer whale predation, rests on the beach at Brent and Judy Johnson’s set-net site near Clam Gulch earlier this month. The whale was floating near where the Johnsons were going to set their nets, so Brent Johnson hauled it ashore. It quickly became a visitors draw.
Redoubt Reporter
As a commercial fisherman, Brent Johnson wants to haul in a big catch. But at 28.5 feet long and about as many tons, what he found in the water Aug. 7 off his family set-net site near Clam Gulch was more than he bargained for.
Johnson was preparing for an early morning Aug. 8 fishing opening when he spotted something that looked a little like an overturned boat floating by about a half mile out in Cook Inlet. Upon investigation he instead found a dead whale.
Johnson said he only knows enough about whales to know it wasn’t a beluga. Beyond that he was stumped, but he did know that he didn’t want the whale floating into his nets when they were set the next morning, so he towed the whale to shore and landed it about 50 feet from the family’s fishing cabin. Any undivided attention due to other duties by anyone in camp at that point was quickly diverted to the whale.
“The crew has clicked pictures like the thing was a supermodel,” Johnson said.
After all, it was hard to miss, both in size and smell.
“I told Brent, ‘Could you have at least pulled it in several hundred feet from us?’” said Brent’s wife, Judy, on Aug. 8. “It’s next to our cabin, and last night it washed closer to us. After tonight it might be right in our driveway.”
On Aug. 8 Johnson reported the whale to the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Marine Mammal Stranding Hotline, and on Aug. 9 a crew from the Homer Marine Mammal Stranding Network, led by Debbie Boege-Tobin, a biology professor with Kenai Peninsula College’s Kachemak Bay Campus, came to examine the whale.
They determined it was a female humpback.
That’s a first sighting for the Johnsons, who have fished off Corea Bend since 1977.
“We’ve seen belugas before, but never something like a humpback,” Judy said.
At only 28.5 feet long, the whale was probably a juvenile, since adult female humpbacks average around 50 feet when full grown, from about 10 to 15 feet when born.
Humpback calves are born in warmer, southern water where the whales, like many Alaskans, spend the winter, typically around Baja Mexico or Hawaii.
“They’re just lucky enough to get to do it for like six months,” Boege-Tobin said.
The whales generally start heading south between September and November and return April through June. Humpbacks are primarily found in Southeast and Southcentral Alaska, but are increasingly common farther north, seeking to feast in Alaska’s marine bounty.
“During the calving process they’re not feeding, they’re giving many of their calories away in their milk to their offspring. They come up primarily for the food, the krill that is so abundant in the rich, cold waters,” Boege-Tobin said. “They usually will go as far as Chukchi Sea to feed. But they do seem to be expanding northward, like most everything else these days, due to climate change or
The Johnsons’ granddaughters, Brittney Mills, 13, Grace Mills, 9, and Mariah Mills, 6.
whatever the factors may be.”
Death can come from run-ins with boats, fishing gear or other human impacts, accidental strandings, illness or other creatures. The cause of death of the humpback in Clam Gulch was not certain, but there were signs of killer whale predation, Boege-Tobin said, including teeth marks on the tail fluke and pectoral fin — the throat was ripped open and the tongue was missing.
“But we don’t know if that was the cause of death or if that occurred when the animal was already dying from something else, or if it occurred just after the whale died,” Boege-Tobin said. “Some anecdotal evidence has shown killer whales will bite and hold onto, say, the pectoral fin or the tail fluke to drown the animal and kill it that way, but we have no way of assessing whether it died from that.”
A gray whale that washed ashore on Bishop’s Beach in Homer on July 26 showed much more pronounced signs of predation. Not only were the throat and tongue completely ripped out, the whale’s entire layers of skin and blubber were removed. That gray whale was about 26 feet, which is small for an average adult size of 40 feet. But it was difficult to assess much with that whale, given the state it was in, Boege-Tobin said.
A week prior to the Homer whale a crew assessed another gray whale on the beach near the outlet of Stariski Creek. This one was so fresh some of the tissue could still have been edible. There were no obvious signs of death in that whale, a 36-foot male. It was in such good condition that volunteers dissected it and harvested the skull, lower jaw, first several vertebra, scapula (shoulder blade) and left pectoral fin to use for a re-articulated gray whale skeleton on display at the Pratt Museum in Homer.
Thanks to a significant volunteer effort, financial support and equipment donations from the community — each piece needing heavy equipment to move — the whale sections were relocated and buried in horse manure to speed the decomposition process.
Boege-Tobin said that one of the volunteers, Lee Post, an expert in skeletal articulations, recommended horse manure to clean the bones.
Photo courtesy of Brent Johnson. A beached humpback whale remains on the beach near Clam Gulch after being assessed by a team from the Homer Marine Mammal Stranding Network. Biologists and network volunteers take several measurements and samples to be sent off for testing.
“Lee said that the best way, especially in our Alaska climate, to decompose a whale skeleton or parts thereof is to bury it in horse manure because the microorganisms and the warmth from those microorganisms and the horse manure really decay not just the fleshy tissue, but they break down the oil quite a bit,” Boege-Tobin said. “I’m literally standing on top or right next to it, and unless you put your face right up next to it you don’t really smell the whale. It just smells a little like old horse manure. It doesn’t even smell unusually stinky.”
That’s just one of many bits of new knowledge Boege-Tobin picked up from an unusually busy summer of beached whales in her area. She said the stranding network, under the auspices of the Seward SeaLife Center and, ultimately, the National Marine Fisheries Service, responds to every report of a beached marine mammal that it can.
“We try to sample any marine mammal, whether it’s a large whale or a small whale or a sea otter or whatever the case may be, as a way to gauge what may or may not be going on in the marine environment,” she said.
Much can be learned from analyzing the creatures. On humpback whales, for instance, several measurements are taken, including total length as well as length from snout to dorsal fin and snout to genitals, flipper length, girth, blubber thickness, number of throat grooves and number of baleen plates. Tissue samples are taken from the blubber, skin and muscle, and somewhere in the digestive tract, although that isn’t always possible depending on how long the whale has been dead. The Clam Gulch humpback had apparently been dead and floating for a while before Johnson hauled it to shore.
“One of our volunteers said it looked like intestinal pudding. It was basically so decomposed that we couldn’t get a sample when we cut into the abdominal cavity,” Boege-Tobin said.
Data is added to a genetic database maintained at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the various samples are sent to various labs in Alaska and the Lower 48 to be tested for various things, both about the health of the individual specimen, as well as the marine environment.
“We can look for certain types of harmful algal bloom evidence. Since they’re feeding on a lot of these organisms, if there’s some sort of a toxin that’s accumulating, it would show up in their gut,” Boege-Tobin said. “In their blubber we can look for accumulations of, say, POP’s — a class of plastics — or potential heavy metal contamination, or any other type of viral or bacterial infectious agents in the water column.”
But although responding to three beached whales in a summer is unusual for the stranding network, it doesn’t necessarily mean there’s anything unusual going on at sea.
“Three whales, it’s unusual they all happened to land on area beaches around here, but I think that it’s not atypical in the sense that these animals die for a variety of reasons and the majority of our coasts are not often visited by humans, so I think a lot of them beach in areas that people don’t know about,” Boege-Tobin said. “So three right here for us to sample all within a four-week period was more than we’ve ever had to deal with, but I don’t think it was indicative of anything going awry in the marine environment.”
Boege-Tobin said she’d also like people — especially potential volunteers — to know that the Homer Marine Mammal Stranding Network does more than just necropsies.
“We dealt this summer, and we deal often, with the live stuff, too. We had a couple sea otter pups and a harbor seal pup and sometimes there’s a juvenile or adult that comes in that needs rescuing, too. So it’s not just the dead, stinky stuff. Sometimes it’s the cute fuzzy ones,” she said.
The organization is always looking for volunteers, trains them and does not require prior biological experience, she said. They’ll happily take people who just volunteer to use their four-wheeler to drive a crew down the beach, for instance.
For more information or to inquire about volunteering, contact Boege-Tobin at dtobin@uaa.alaska.edu.
