News: Whale Spotted on Long Island Beach
(Long Island, N.Y.) The carcass of a forty-foot-long finback whale was found this morning along the shores of The Sands beach club in Atlantic Beach. Authorities were unsure of the animal’s gender or how long it had been deceased. Some stated that the tail had been sliced from what could have been an accident, and that it appeared to have been in a state of decomposition for a couple of days.
Atlantic Beach is handled by the Town of Hempstead, which is responsible for disposing of the whale once marine biologists perform a necropsy. The location is thirty miles from Manhattan, directly west of Long Beach on Long Island’s most western and southern barrier island. The Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation will perform tests to determine the animal’s cause of death.
Marine experts believe that the carcass belongs to the same whale they have been tracking since Sunday and was last seen in Long Branch, New Jersey. Those who had studied the animal were waiting to see when and where it would surface. Finback whales are not uncommon to Long Island beaches, but are normally spotted in deeper waters further from shore.
The presence of the Nassau County Police Department and a helicopter that flew overhead alerted residents that there was a crisis at the beach. In recent weeks a dead pilot whale was found off the shores of Fire Island and at least six basking sharks were spotted in the waters of Cupsogue Beach County Park. Like some of Long Island’s marine mammals, finback whales take to the area all year long.
The finback whale is also known as the fin or razorback whale and is classified as an endangered species. It is the second longest whale and sixth largest living animal, reaching up to eighty-eight feet in length and weighing 150,000 pounds. Nonetheless, it is known for its slender shape and speed, making it capable of swimming twenty-five miles-per-hour and leaping entirely out of the water.
Finback whales have a lifespan that is longer than humans, and some have been known to live 140 years. They populate waters all over the world in climates that range from polar to tropic. Consuming up to four-thousand pounds of food daily, they are able to engulf eighteen-thousand gallons of water in a single gulp. Like humans, their estimated feeding time is three hours a day.
The whale hunting that occurred in the past century has taken the lives of a lot of finbacks, and has disrupted their reproductive patterns. Finback whales communicate with potential mates at low frequency sounds that are disrupted by human activity. Newborn finbacks are over twenty-feet-long and weigh an estimated four-thousand pounds.
Finback whales communicate at the lowest frequency sounds made by any living animal on the planet. When experts recorded the sounds made by finbacks, they believed that they had been listening to submarine noises or that they were experiencing an equipment malfunction.
