Unusual whale deaths reported off POW

In late August, three juvenile humpback whales were found dead off the west coast of Prince of Wales Island within just two weeks. A young subadult female was found in waters south of El Capitan on August 22, while a young subadult female and a young male whale were found in waters near Craig on August 30 and September 2, respectively.

On August 30, Kathy Peavey, a longtime Craig resident and whale watcher, learned of one of the whales, the subadult female, found dead in Squam Bay north of Craig. The news came from Michelle Dutro, a State of Alaska Sea Grant fellow who helps oversee the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Protected Resources Division's stranded marine mammal hotline.

Peavey told the Ketchikan Daily News that Dutro called her after NOAA received an initial report of the dead humpback whale from two fishermen on the F/V Longshot.

When she heard about the dead whale, Peavey realized that her son Steven Peavey, her daughter-in-law Melyssa Nagamine and her newborn baby were in the same area where the whale had been found with their boat, F/V Gail Renee.

Nagamine said she and her family had almost completed the days-long journey home from Juneau to Craig, where she gave birth to her baby in late August after the gillnet fishing season ended, when Kathy called about the whale.

“We realized we were only 15, 20 minutes away from the whale, so we turned back,” Nagamine said.

The family found the whale, wrapped a rope around the tail fin of the almost adult female and pulled her to shore in an inflatable dinghy.

Nagamine sat in the dinghy and pulled the whale with her baby, about two weeks old, snuggled to her chest. When the family reached the beach, Steven pulled on the line hand over hand to bring the whale to shore.

Two days later, on September 1, Kathy Peavey, MaryAnna Murphy, Cheryl Fecko and Dolores Owen visited the whale to collect samples since NOAA team members were unable to travel to Craig.

Fecko, a retired Craig High School science teacher, said a team of experts had made travel plans to perform an autopsy on the whale, but those plans fell through.

Natalie Rouse, who works for Alaska Veterinary Pathology Services and coordinates stranding response efforts and performs autopsies on behalf of NOAA, “explained to me some of the samples, basically tissue samples, that she thought we should take,” Fecko said.

“She sent us a kind of data sheet and basically they wanted us to take six samples,” Fecko said. “They wanted an eyeball and barnacles. And they wanted blubber, a blubber sample. And they also wanted feces, a feces sample.”

Rouse also requested “a series of photographs, looking for injuries or anything else that might be of interest to someone trying to determine the cause of death.”

“That's essentially what we did,” Fecko said, noting that the team of local residents “didn't really have experience” dealing with dead whales.

“It was a really amazing experience to be that close to a humpback whale, but it ended up being pretty bad news,” Fecko said. “I mean, I just felt bad about cutting up this magnificent creature.”

The work the small crew did under NOAA's stranding agreement SA-AKR 2023-02 was sad and difficult, Peavey said, adding that removing the whale blubber was particularly difficult.

Peavey said her sister, MaryAnna Murphy, took on the task of removing one of the whale's eyeballs, something no one else in the group wanted to do.

Fecko said the group sent the collected samples to Mandy Keogh, NOAA's Alaska region stranding coordinator in Juneau, where experts were able to examine some of the tissues.

She said members of the NOAA team “mentioned something about the toxic algal bloom that has the potential to kill marine mammals.

“I think they wanted to do some tests on that,” Fecko said. “Then, you know, anything we had in photographs that might indicate a collision, a collision with a boat or something like that, a collision with a ship.”

“So, yeah, we just wanted to help in some way, so we went there,” Fecko said. “We did everything we could without having experts on site.”

The next day, September 2, Peavey, Fecko and Owen were up at the dock in Craig when they saw Heather Douville and her father and brother come ashore with a load of sea otters they had killed. Peavey said she told the Douvilles about the biopsy the amateur crew had performed the day before.

“They (Douvilles) said, 'What are you talking about? We just left the whale,'” Peavey said.

While hunting sea otters, Peavey said the Douvilles came across another dead humpback whale, a young male, washed up on a beach on Lulu Island west of Craig.

Peavey said Heather, with the help of Ted Cheeseman, who runs the whale identification website happywhale.com, took a photo of the tail fluke that helped identify the whale, and Peavey advised her to report the stranding to NOAA as soon as possible.

Dutro confirmed that the first report of the death of a young male humpback whale on Lulu Island, about 20 miles southwest of Squam Bay, was received on Monday.

After receiving reports that a second dead humpback whale had been found in the same area, NOAA assembled a team to travel to Craig and perform a field autopsy on the humpback whale found on Lulu Island.

The necropsy, also authorized under NOAA's stranding agreement SA-AKR-2023-02, took place Thursday and included staff from the Seacoast Indigenous Guardians Network of the Central Council of Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska. Heather Douville, who serves as senior project coordinator for the Indigenous Guardians Network, assisted with the necropsy.

Dutro said in an email Friday that the team also included “experienced veterinarians and a technician contracted through Alaska Veterinary Pathology Services (AVPS), which works with NOAA Fisheries as a Stranding Agreement Holder.”

“These experts led the autopsy and were very grateful for the opportunity to work with Heather Douville and her network to coordinate and respond to this stranding,” Dutro wrote.

Dutro said NOAA is working to determine a possible cause of death for the whale based on the autopsy performed Thursday.

Peavey noted that the male and female humpback whales found near Craig were in “almost the same stage of decomposition” and had “similar mouth wounds” that responders had captured in photographs. She added that a large pod of orcas passed through the area about three weeks ago.

While discussing details of the two dead humpback whales found near Craig and NOAA's relief efforts, Dutro said a third dead humpback whale was found in the last few weeks before POW.

On August 22, a female subadult humpback whale was found dead off the coast of Northwest POW in the inner channel south of El Capitan.

Dutro said no necropsy was performed on this whale, but that a “local who reported the incident took some samples from him and took some photos” after reporting the whale death to NOAA.

In response to a query from the Ketchikan Daily News about the unusual nature of the three humpback whale deaths off the coast of POW, Dutro provided an overview of natural and man-made reasons for whale deaths or strandings.

Whales “sometimes die from natural causes, such as old age, and wash up on our beaches,” Dutro wrote. “However, there are also a number of stressors that threaten these whales, such as viral and bacterial infections, disease from harmful algal blooms, entanglement in fishing nets and marine debris, injuries from ship collisions, and predation by killer whales.”

“When our field teams investigate stranded whales, they do their best to examine the carcasses for signs of these stressors,” Dutro wrote. “These efforts are critical to improving our understanding of strandings and helping NOAA develop mitigation measures.”

In an earlier phone call on Friday, she explained that humpback whale age classes are determined based on data on body length at each age and that NOAA is currently working to determine more accurate data because humpback whales, on average, are getting “smaller over time,” or not growing as large as they once did.

The age classes used by NOAA for humpback whales are “calf, yearling, subadult and adult,” Dutro said.

According to Dutro, NOAA relies heavily on the public and its partners in the Stranding Network to report stranded animals.

Anyone who sees a stranded, injured, entangled or dead marine mammal is asked to call NOAA Fisheries Alaska's 24-hour statewide stranding hotline at (877) 925-7773.