Who do you call when a dead 6-foot, 250-pound Dall’s porpoise washes up on the beach?
Last week, when faced with this dilemma, Freeland resident Jane Page called in Susan Berta of the Marine Mammal Stranding Network. Page discovered the body of a Dall’s porpoise on her beach Thursday afternoon.
“I thought it was a baby orca whale because of its black-over-white coloring,” Page said.
For that reason, Page called Berta, who is also with the Whidbey-based Orca Network. On Jan. 10, Berta and several volunteers wrapped the carcass in a blue tarp and rolled it off the beach with a hand truck. They tried to preserve the carcass for study.
“A property owner’s stinky problem is actually a scientist’s treasure,” Berta said as she photographed the carcass before hauling it away.
Page was glad to see the body of the dead porpoise depart.
“I didn’t know how I was going to get rid of it,” she said. “Wait for high tide to take it back out to sea, but then it would end up on another private beach.”
The dead porpoise was hauled to Berta’s home in the back of a pickup and packed in ice until scientist Brad Hanson from the National Marine Fisheries Service picked up for transport to the NMFS lab at Sandpoint.
Hanson said he does not often get specimens like this.
“We get about 12 dead Dall’s porpoises a year from Puget Sound beaches,” he said. “They are real valuable to us. A necropsy of the animal will help us determine what is going on with the population, its habitat and food sources.”
Hanson, who has been studying harbor and Dall’s porpoises for 13 years, estimates the Dall’s population at about 1,000 animals in Puget Sound. The species is not considered endangered.
After making the visual inspection of the animal earlier this week, Berta said it is likely porpoise discovered on the Freeland beach was probably injured or killed by another animal.
“It looks like a chunk was taken out of its head by an orca whale,” she said, noting that a similarly wounded seal sighted on a Camano Island beach several days earlier had to be euthanized.
A Dall’s porpoise can be identified in the water by its distinctive rooster tail splash and a triangular, white-tipped dorsal fin. Dall’s porpoises have a stocky, black bodies with large white sections on the flanks and belly. The head is small and beakless. The animals they can measure up to 8 feet long and weigh 400 pounds.
According to Berta, these porpoises are social and are enthusiastic bow riders on boats.
The Dall’s porpoise was named 1885 by Frederick True of the National Museum’s Department of Biology after the zoologist W. H. Dall, who first brought the species to his attention.
Call in the investigators
Believe it or not, the carcass of the marine mammal washed up on a beach can tell a story to biologists. To report dead or injured marine mammals, call Susan Berta at 360-678-6768.
