ANCHORAGE — Federal biologists have confirmed that two of the three killer whales that swam far up a river in southwestern Alaska have died.
NOAA Fisheries spokeswoman Julie Speegle says the carcasses were spotted during a flight over the Nushagak River on Saturday.
The two dead whales appeared to be adults. A necropsy is planned for early this week. The third, a juvenile, was seen downriver from the carcasses, and biologists were going to assess its health on Sunday in deciding whether to try to force it out to sea.
The whales were first spotted in the river about three weeks ago, and had been in danger of starvation.
Comments (8)
Add commentUnnatural.
Alaska villagers that I've met tend to shoot at marine mammals;either to keep them from eating salmon or for recreation.I hope they look carefully for bullet holes.
Good lord, all the people
Good lord, all the people that just stood by and waited. We should have tried to move these guys out.
Barnacles?
I would like to see a follow up report including Julie Speegle's final report on this issue. Barnacles do not form in fresh water... It would take extraordinary circumstances for barnacles to form on Orcas in saltwater. It may be these animals were terminally diseased or contaminated with toxins and they were committing suicide. Or of course, shot either in salt or fresh water, or both.
Animals Die....
Animals die everyday in nature. Why in the world are we fretting over it when we have children in our country starving and dieing everyday.
Drugs, child abuse, and various other crimes are committed every hour, hell every minute on our fellow man. I really think dead whales isn't news. It's more news that NOAA just watched them until they died, but still not as important as what's happening to our own race all around us.
@Ak_Mom: we often have a more
@Ak_Mom: we often have a more visceral reaction to animals dying because animals are amoral. They don't have the capability of making choices based on morality (as far as we know--maybe whales and dolphins and higher-order primates can). Humans do. When a human commits an act against another human, we know that even the victim isn't truly innocent--they have done bad things, as we all have, and this changes our perception.
Also, it's incredibly unusual for a whale to migrate up a river and into a lake. This is newsworthy, although perhaps those incurious individuals who only judge stories on their immediate importance should steer clear.
That said, it's probably not healthy to think that our "race" takes precedence over all others, considering we ARE part of nature and depend on other "races," whether you like it or not. The most arrogant thing we do as a species is assume we're apart from and above nature.
Spoor...agree with you.
The photo showing the 'barnacles' doesn't look like skin on any Orca I've ever seen in the wild - it looks to me like there was something abnormal going on - on the skin at least.
Not barnacles
An earlier report said that their skin forms a membrane when they're out of salt water for a period of time. That's what you're seeing in the photo.
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