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 whale 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 told the Ketchikan Daily News that Dutro called her after NOAA received an initial report about the dead humpback from a pair of fishermen on the F/V Longshot.
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, F/V Gail Renee, in the same area where the whale had been found.
Nagamine said she and her family had almost completed a days-long run home to Craig from Juneau, where she delivered her baby in late August after wrapping up a gillnet fishing season, when Kathy 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 of the subadult female and pulled her to shore with an inflatable zodiac skiff.
Nagamine sat in the zodiac, towing the whale, with her baby, who was about two weeks old, wrapped against her chest. Once the family reached the beach, Steven pulled the line hand-over-hand to bring the whale to shore.
Two days later, on Sept. 1, Kathy Peavey, MaryAnna Murphy, Cheryl Fecko and Dolores Owen visited the whale to conduct sampling work because NOAA team members were not able to travel to Craig.
Fecko, who is a retired Craig High School science teacher, said a team of experts made travel plans to conduct a necropsy on the whale, but those plans fell through.
So, 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 said.
“She sent kind of a data sheet for us and basically we had six samples that she wanted us to take,” Fecko said. “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.
“So that’s basically what we did,” Fecko said, noting that the team of local residents “didn’t really have any experience” working with dead whales.
“It was really a fascinating experience to be up close like that to a humpback whale but it also, in the end, was kind of bad news,” Fecko said. “I mean, I just felt kind of bad cutting away on this magnificent creature.”
The work, which the small crew completed under the NOAA stranding response agreement SA-AKR 2023-02, was sad and difficult, according to Peavey, who said that removing blubber from the whale is particularly challenging.
Peavey said that 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 that they collected to Mandy Keogh, the Alaska Region stranding coordinator for NOAA, in Juneau, where experts could conduct research on some of the tissues.
She said that NOAA team members had “mentioned something about the toxic algal bloom that potentially can kill marine mammals.
“I think they were going to be doing some tests with regards to that,” Fecko said. “Then, you know, anything that we had in photos that might indicate a strike, a boat strike, or something, ship strike.
“So, yeah, we were just hoping to help in some way, that was why we went out there,” Fecko said. “We did everything we could without any experts being there.”
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 that she told the Douvilles about the biopsy that the amateur crew had conducted the day before.
“The (Douvilles) said ‘What are you talking about? We just left the whale,'” Peavey said.
During their sea otter harvest, the Douvilles had encountered another dead humpback, a young male, that had washed up on a beach on Lulu Island, west of Craig, according to Peavey.
Peavey said that Heather had taken a photo of the tail that could identify the whale with the help of Ted Cheeseman, who runs the whale identification website happywhale.com, and that Peavey advised her to report the stranding to NOAA as soon as possible.
Dutro confirmed that the initial report of the dead young male humpback at Lulu Island, which is about 20 miles southwest of Squam Bay, came in on Monday.
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, which also was authorized under the NOAA stranding agreement SA-AKR-2023-02, took place on Thursday and 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.
Dutro stated in an email Friday that the team also “involved expert veterinarians and a technician who are contracted through Alaska Veterinary Pathology Services (AVPS), who partner with NOAA Fisheries as a Stranding Agreement Holder.”
“These experts led the necropsy effort and were very grateful for the opportunity to work with Heather Douville and her network to coordinate and respond to this stranding,” Dutro wrote.
NOAA is working to determine a potential cause of the whale’s death from the necropsy conducted Thursday, according to Dutro.
Peavey noted that the subadult female and male humpbacks found near Craig were found in “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.
While discussing details about the two dead subadult humpbacks found near Craig, and NOAA’s response efforts, Dutro said that a third dead humpback had been found off of POW in recent weeks.
On Aug. 22, a female subadult humpback whale was found dead off northwest POW in the inner channel south of El Capitan.
Dutro said that no necropsy was done for 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.
Responding to a Ketchikan Daily News inquiry on the unusual nature of the three humpback mortalities off POW, Dutro provided an overview of natural and human-caused reasons for whale deaths or strandings.
Whales “do sometimes die of natural causes, like old age, and wash up on our beaches,” Dutro wrote. “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.
“When our field teams conduct examinations of stranded whales, they do their best to investigate the carcass for signs of these stressors,” Dutro wrote. “These efforts are crucial to advancing our understanding of strandings and help inform NOAA’s mitigation measures.
She explained during an earlier phone call on Friday that age classes of humpback whales are determined by using “length-at-age” data, and that NOAA is currently working to find more accurate data because humpbacks, on average, are becoming “shorter over time,” or not growing as large as they used to.
The humpback age classes that NOAA uses, based on length, are “calf, yearling, subadult and adult,” Dutro said.
NOAA relies heavily on members of the public and its Stranding Network partners to report stranded animals, according to Dutro.
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.