A whale of a tale:

Last Thursday, June 20, members of the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, the Forest Service, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and local volunteers all converged on the beach of east Wrangell, near Channel Island, to dissect a dead gray whale that had washed ashore.

Kate Savage, once a veterinarian in Wrangell but now working with NOAA, said that an Unusual Mortality Event is occurring all along the Pacific Coast, from Alaska to Mexico. There have been over 150 dead whales reported this year, according to a report by NOAA. Savage said that she and other members of her team arrived in Wrangell late Wednesday afternoon, June 19, and were supposed to catch the afternoon flight out the same day as the necropsy. Time and tides wait for no one, as the saying goes, so the team worked through the day racing against the rising tide and their own schedules.

"Mainly what I'm thinking of is, there's a list going on in my head of the things that I would really like to get and how can I get to it," Savage said. "So on this one we're not going to get to any of the bones, so I just give up on that. But then it's like, okay, we need stomach content, so how do we get to the stomach?"

The dead whale is a 30-foot long male, Savage said. The time of death is unknown. It can be hard to tell when the carcass has been floating in the water for a long period of time, she said. Savage also added that it would be unlikely to get samples from some of the internal organs such as its liver or kidney, saying that a dead whale's insides can cook fast if it is a hot day.

What the necropsy team has focused on, according to Savage, is starting on the outside of the whale and cutting their way in. The whale's body was checked for external injuries that may point to its death. Finding none on the carcass, they began looking inside of it. They cut off a sample of its baleen, the filter-feeding "teeth" inside the gray whale's mouth, to see what it had been eating recently. They also cut away sides of its blubber, and began working to get samples from the stomach and lungs. NOAA and other organizations have been working to try and find why the mortality event is happening, but so far no concrete evidence has pointed to a single cause.

"The thought is maybe that foraging is a problem for these animals, that maybe they're malnourished," Savage said. "It's going to be kind of a long haul, the ice extent in the Bering is super low, it might be on a record low last year and this year. I don't know if there's any indications that that's going to turn around, and that impacts a whole slew of different species ... But that being said, I have no idea what the cause of death is for these animals, so that's just my little theory. I'd be open to changing it if we had evidence of something different."

While NOAA was taking the lead on the necropsy, several other local organizations played important roles. The Forest Service provided logistical support for the necropsy, and several members also helped in the physical dissection and sample taking.

"I got on top of the whale and cut right down the middle so that we could start taking the blubber off the sides to expose the intestines and stuff," said Forest Service intern Matt Brodsky. "That was fun, I got a lot of gas in my face. That was great."

"When they told us that we were going to be helping with the whale I didn't even expect this," added intern Kelsie Alling. "I might do this once every 20 years."

While the necropsy was not as in-depth as she would have liked, Savage said that it was still a terrific research opportunity. She added that the Forest Service was going to leave the whale tied to the beach, and had set up cameras along the tree line to watch it. They wanted to see what kind of animals the carcass attracts, she said. Savage also asked that the public stay away from the carcass, as they do not want anything disrupted. Look, she said, don't touch.

"It would be really nice if they don't grab baleen, which is actually illegal. Don't come and take anything from this whale, which is at this point still illegal. I think the Forest Service will be checking it. What I'd really like to do is eventually see if there's any fractures, for example. As you can tell, based on the time that we have, that we're not going to get to the bony pieces, but later on," Savage said.

Savage said that it will take some time to fully look into the samples they have taken from the gray whale. In the meantime, the UME continues. A press release from NOAA on June 20 reported that another two gray whales were reported dead west of Sitka and south of Ketchikan. This brings the total number of gray whales dead in the UME in Alaska up to 10.

This is not the first time that a dead whale has appeared near Wrangell. According to Austin O'Brien, with the Forest Service, about a decade ago a humpback whale died in the area after getting tangled in a gill net.