A young whale thrashed the water, beached itself at an oil depot dock and died suddenly on Wednesday after two days of swimming aimlessly in a small bay off an industrial section of Brooklyn. Animal activists said the minke whale, about a year old, had been too young to survive on its own.
"It's very sad," said Kim Durham, a rescue specialist at the Long Island-based Riverhead Foundation for Research and Preservation, who had monitored the troubled animal's activities around the clock. "It was a very young whale that became confused and disoriented."
The whale died about 5 p.m. The end was witnessed by spectators who had been drawn to the dock area in Gowanus Bay by news accounts of the whale. A police harbor boat secured the whale's carcass, estimated to weigh about 3,500 to 5,000 pounds, to the Hess Oil Co. dock, where it was to remain overnight. It was to be towed to an Army Corps of Engineers dock at Caven Point, in Jersey City, N.J., on Thursday for a necropsy by Riverhead marine experts, according to Peter Shugert, a Corps spokesman.
Durham had said earlier that "something's not right" about the whale's condition and where it was. "It would be great if we could say to the whale, `Say, "Ahhh," and stick your tongue out,'" she said. |