A dead 40-foot whale washed up at South Beach in Edgartown on Friday. The sei whale may have been killed by a boat propeller.
David Grunden, the Oak Bluffs shellfish constable and member of the Island’s marine mammal stranding network, and his team investigated. Mr. Grunden believes the sei whale probably had been dead for a week or more.
Last Friday Skip Bettencourt was strolling the Chappaquiddick side of the Norton Point breach with his wife, his dog and two friends when he stumbled across six feet of bloodied blubber. With the tooth-studded lower jaw of a sperm whale and the pointed snout of a shark, the animal cut an outlandish profile.
“We had no idea what it was,” he said. “It looked like it hadn’t been there that long, though.”
With Rhode Island Sound now looming as the next frontier for wind development near the Vineyard, the Ocean State’s Gov. Donald Carcieri summed up his state’s energy policy this month with a single phrase: “Spin, baby, spin!”
Wind farms have long provoked a certain cognitive dissonance among environmentalists, who favor renewable energy but oppose the negative impacts of turbines, including bird strikes and habitat displacement. The effects of turbines on bird populations are fairly well understood after a decade of European experience but less is known about their impact underwater, especially on local species of whales and sea turtles.
An extraordinary group of right whales — some 95 living specimens of the rarest of all large whale species — was feeding in the waters between Martha’s Vineyard and Block Island this week, while two mother and calf right whale pairs were spotted even closer to the Island.
On Saturday, federal scientists in the air saw one mother and calf pair just a mile or two off Oak Bluffs harbor, and on Tuesday, a distinct pair was spotted in Vineyard Sound.
The rare right whales sighted last month off Block Island and off Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket have left — but their presence has brought about a shift in thinking in the scientific community.
Last weekend, only one right whale was spotted off the Rhode Island shoreline by the Coast Guard. It is believed the animals have moved to the waters off Chatham or Provincetown and into Cape Cod Bay.
A badly decomposed 37-foot young humpback whale washed up on South Beach on Friday night.
Sgt. Matthew Bass of the state environmental police said the whale was first spotted in the wash Friday afternoon, in an out of reach on a private beach near Job’s Neck Pond.
This spring endangered Northern Atlantic right whales have been seen and photographed swimming in Vineyard waters. Marine scientists who monitor right whales, considered the rarest among marine mammals, reported seeing 57 whales off Noman’s Land and nearly a dozen south of the Vineyard two weeks ago. More than 200 whales, about half the known population, have been seen since January in Cape Cod Bay.
Until a week ago the waters off of Race Point in Provincetown were a pageant of marine life, with divebombing gannets, 80-foot fin whales slicing the surface, dolphins and porpoises circling like gnats and docile North Atlantic right whales skimming blithely by, mouths agape.
As the federal government presses ahead with plans to develop wind farms on a 1,300-square-mile plot of ocean south of the Vineyard, on Monday night the Island had its turn to have a say about it.
Representatives from the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, accompanied by members of the Gov. Deval Patrick administration and Cape and Islands Rep. Timothy Madden, came to the Katharine Cornell Theatre in Vineyard Haven Monday to solicit public comment as part of a call for information announced on Feb. 6.
