Three young humpback whales were found dead off the west coast of Prince of Wales Island in just two weeks at the end of August. One subadult female was found on Aug. 22 in waters south of El Capitan, while a subadult female and a young male were found in waters near Craig on Aug. 30 and Sept. 2, respectively.
On Aug. 30, longtime Craig resident whale-watcher Kathy Peavey heard about one of the whales, the subadult female that was found dead in Squam Bay north of Craig, from Michelle Dutro, an Alaska State Sea Grant fellow who helps monitor the marine mammal stranding hotline for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Protected Resources Division.
Peavey said Dutro called her after NOAA received an initial report about the dead humpback from fishermen.
When she heard about the dead whale, Peavey realized that her son, Steven Peavey, daughter-in-law Melyssa Nagamine and their newborn baby were out on their boat, Gail Renee, in the same area where the whale had been found.
Nagamine said Sept. 6 that she and her family had almost completed a dayslong run home to Craig from Juneau, where she delivered her baby in late August after wrapping up a gillnet fishing season, when Peavey called about the whale.
“We realized we were just 15, 20 minutes away from the whale so we turned around,” Nagamine said.
The family found the whale, wrapped a line around the tail and pulled her to shore with an inflatable Zodiac skiff and then pulled a line hand-over-hand from the beach to bring the whale to shore.
Two days later, on Sept. 1, Kathy Peavey, MaryAnna Murphy, Cheryl Fecko and Dolores Owen arrived to conduct sampling work because NOAA team members were not able to travel to Craig.
Fecko, a retired Craig High School science teacher, said Natalie Rouse, who works for Alaska Veterinary Pathology Services and is contracted by NOAA to coordinate stranding responses and conduct necropsies, “talked me through some of the specimens, tissue samples, basically, that she’d need for us to take.”
Fecko explained: “They wanted an eyeball and they wanted some barnacles. And they wanted blubber, a blubber sample. And they also wanted feces, a sample of feces.”
Rouse also requested “a number of photos looking for lesions or anything that might be of interest to somebody trying to determine cause of death.”
The work was sad and difficult, according to Peavey, who said that removing blubber from the whale is particularly challenging. Her sister, MaryAnna Murphy, stepped up to the task of removing an eyeball from the whale, which no one else in the group wanted to do.
Fecko said that the group sent the samples to NOAA in Juneau.
The next day, on Sept. 2, Peavey, Fecko and Owen were at the top of the harbor in Craig when they saw Heather Douville and her dad and brother pulling in with a load of sea otters they had harvested. Peavey said she told the Douvilles about the biopsy the amateur crew had conducted the day before.
“The (Douvilles) said, ‘What are you talking about? We just left the whale.’”
During their sea otter harvest, the Douvilles had encountered a dead humpback, a young male, which had washed up on a beach on Lulu Island, west of Craig, according to Peavey.
After hearing reports that a second humpback had been found dead in the same area, NOAA mustered a team to travel to Craig and conduct a field necropsy of the humpback found on Lulu Island.
The necropsy involved staff of the Central Council of Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska’s Seacoast Indigenous Guardians Network. Heather Douville, who serves as senior project coordinator for the Indigenous guardians network, assisted in the necropsy.
NOAA is working to determine a potential cause of the whale’s death.
Peavey noted that the humpbacks found near Craig were at “nearly (the) same decomposition stage” and showed “similar mouth sores” that responders captured in photos. She added that a large pod of orcas was moving through the area about three weeks ago.
Dutro said a third dead humpback had been found off Prince of Wales Island earlier in August. On Aug. 22, a female subadult humpback whale was found dead in the inner channel south of El Capitan.
Dutro said no necropsy was done of that whale, but that a “local who reported it took some samples of it and collected some photos” after reporting the whale mortality to NOAA.
Whales “do sometimes die of natural causes, like old age, and wash up on our beaches,” Dutro wrote in an email to the Ketchikan Daily News. “However, there are also a number of compounding stressors that threaten these whales, such as viral and bacterial infections, disease caused by exposure to harmful algal blooms, entanglements in fishing gear and marine debris, injuries caused by vessel strikes, and predation by killer whales.”
NOAA relies heavily on members of the public and its Stranding Network partners to report stranded animals. Anybody who sees a stranded, injured, entangled or dead marine mammal is encouraged to call the NOAA Fisheries Alaska Statewide 24-hour Stranding Hotline (877) 925-7773.
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