Humpback whale photographed 40 years ago in Caribbean dies after beaching on Sable Island

A humpback whale died in early November after beaching itself on Sable Island, about 200 kilometres off the coast of Nova Scotia, and Parks Canada workers determined they were unable to save the animal.

The whale was identified while it was alive, based on a photograph taken by Parks Canada that showed a distinguishing mark on its tail. The whale had been previously sighted over 40 years ago. 

"We were all in the vehicle out on a patrol going eastward along the South Beach and we came across the humpback whale," said Sarah Medill, operations co-ordinator for Sable Island national park reserve. "A humpback whale is about 25 tonnes and we knew that we don't have equipment or any ability to help in that kind of a situation."

Medill said Parks Canada only has two Bobcat loaders on the island, which were too small to help the whale.

"There's a number of reasons that we can find them beached to shore," said Tonya Wimmer, executive director for Marine Animal Response Society (MARS). "Sometimes it is purely an accident in the sense that maybe they took a left when they should have taken a right."

MARS, a Canadian charitable organization that focuses on marine animal conservation, received a phone call from Medill and her team to report the incident.

Wimmer and Medill said the team decided they couldn't rescue the 12-metre mammal due to the harsh conditions and the animal's size. 

"Logistics play a big role in this even for a whale of this size," Wimmer said. "To have an animal that big be sort of stranded, high and dry on a beach, it's really difficult to be able to put them back in the water.

"It's an unfortunate thing but sometimes you have to make the really difficult decision to let nature take its course."

When the team was documenting the incident, the whale lifted its tail exposing a distinguishing mark, something Wimmer says is 'like a fingerprint' to help identify the mammal.

After the photograph was taken, it was sent to Allied Whale at the College of the Atlantic in Maine and the Center for Coastal Studies in Massachusetts. It was determined the whale was at least 43 years old, which is not unusual, with some reaching the age of 80, Wimmer said. 

"They were able to match this animal to an individual that was originally sighted in 1982 down on the Silver Bank, south Dominican Republic," Wimmer said.

"The last sighting of this animal was during the early 1990s," she said.

That was during a project called the Years of the North Atlantic Humpback (YoNAH), which brought together researchers to compare photographs and data on the North Atlantic humpback.

The whale's body is still on the Sable Island beach, and samples are being collected for genetic testing. Wimmer said a necropsy would usually be performed to try to determine the cause of death, but it won't be done in this case because of the isolated location and length of time the whale has been dead.