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Rare whale carcass is scientific treasure trove
- Daily Sitka Sentinel
- 17 hours ago
- 7 min read
By Cole Haddock
Daily Sitka Sentinel
Carcasses of two rare Ziphius cavirostris, or goose-beaked whales, were discovered June 5 on two Southeast Alaska beaches, one near Yakutat and the other near Sitka at Fred's Creek cabin on Kruzof Island.
The remains of the whale found near Yakutat were gone before researchers could reach the site. The one found by campers at Fred's Creek was a pregnant female, and its discovery launched a scientific study.
Under the guidance of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s National Stranding Network, Sitka citizen-scientists performed a partial necropsy, and brought tissue samples and the fetus back to Sitka.
Volunteer researchers returned to the Kruzof site two days later and retrieved the skull, a fin, and more tissue samples.
The samples and the fetus now lay frozen in back rooms of the University of Alaska Southeast, Sitka campus, on Japonski Island.
Over the past two weeks, volunteer researchers including Dr. Lauren Wild of UAS-Sitka, and Sitka High biology teacher Stacey Golden boiled parts of the adult whale, hoping to clean the bones enough to use them for educational purposes.
Last Thursday, they took the frozen fetus to the SEARHC health care facility in the former Mt. Edgecumbe Medical Center for a CT scan. Researchers told the Sentinel that so little is known about Ziphius cavirostris, and beaked whales in general, that this fetus could contribute greatly to scientific knowledge.
Ziphius cavirostris, commonly known as Cuvier’s whales or goose-beaked whales, are part of a family of 24 deep-diving beaked whale species. Goose-beaked whales hold the record for the longest and deepest recorded mammal dives in the world.
Data from NOAA documents 77 beaked whale strandings and 24 Cuvier’s whale strandings in Alaska since 2000. There have been 13 documented strandings in Southeast, nine of them since 2000.
Most of the strandings are documented in summer, when many more people are out on the beaches. Often, the species cannot be reached and identified by scientists. According to NOAA, many beaked whales sink rather than strand when they die, making their deaths difficult to track.
NOAA data show that five similar stranding events have occurred in Alaska since 2000, where two or more Cuvier’s whales have been stranded within a few hundred miles. This includes four Cuvier’s whales found around Kodiak Island in June and July 2004.
A necropsy on the fly
The five campers who discovered the large, pale body of a whale on the dark sand beach next to Fred’s Creek Cabin on June 5 were Ellie Schmidt, Annika Ord, Anna Sun, Derek Chung, and Jim Bleil. They said it was massive, strange, and pungent.
Ord, who works with the Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center, connected with NOAA’s National Stranding Network, which monitors and manages stranded marine mammals all over the country. Scientists at the stranding network, which relies heavily on volunteers, could not send anyone out that day, and instead gave necropsy instructions to the campers.
“Honestly – what were they thinking? We’re a bunch of chumps,” Sun said. “Even though it was gross, it was a really cool opportunity.”
The campers took a folding knife, some towels and a few large sticks, and started poking at the whale carcass. “We were really concerned that it was bloated.” Sun explained. Decomposing whales have been known to explode, and "that was kind of the underlying fear… Every time we did anything, we said ‘stand back! ” he said.
After a while, the campers got spooked by the circling birds.
“At the end of the day, we’re cutting open a dead body,” Sun said. “Some primal fear was hitting. We got out of there as quickly as we could.”
They called it for the day, planning to bring home the collected tissue sample and leave the rest of the carcass. Fearful of bears, two members of the party tried to use their boats to drag the carcass out to sea at high tide, but did not succeed.
The next morning, two of the campers went on a "whale patrol." Examining the carcass again, they discovered the fetus. Chung yelled, “It’s a baby – there’s a baby whale in here!”
At the direction of Stranding Network scientists, Bleil and Chung cut the fetus out. The campers carried it to their boat and delivered it to Dr. Wild at UAS - Sitka. “There was an ice chest with a bloody towel over it and some baby whale protruding out,” Sun described. “The weather wasn’t that good, and the baby whale was getting tossed around.”
Chung struggled to explain how the experience affected him. “The eagles flying around, the blood, the sounds of the ocean – it’s burned in my mind. I still don’t know, frankly.”
“I felt better that the scientists were excited about it – it gave some type of purpose to the death and the dissection,” Sun said.
Longest and deepest divers in the world
Ziphius cavirostris hunts in the complete blackness of the “Midnight Zone.” To get there, the whales release most of the air in their lungs. Then they drop, sinking into the depths of the open ocean. They construct the world around them using echolocation, hunting swarms of squid and deep-sea fish with almost no air in their lungs.
The deepest known dive for Ziphius cavirostris was 9,816 feet (nearly 2 miles) and the longest known dive lasted 222 minutes. This is deeper and longer than any other mammal on Earth.
As they age, Ziphius cavirostris heads turn white and their bodies accumulate a patchwork of scars from encounters with sharks and other whales. The whales have a life-span comparable to a human's (60-65 years) and brains that weigh six pounds (twice as big as a human brain.) Ziphius cavirostris is “cosmopolitan,” meaning they are found all over the world, except the poles.
Beyond this, little is known about Ziphius cavirostris.
CT scan at old SEARHC campus
On June 9 Ord and Schmidt returned to the whale carcass at Fred's Creek with Dr. Lauren Wild and National Stranding Network volunteers.
They found the carcass in a decomposed state, with signs a bear had visited. The team retrieved skin samples, the stomach and stomach contents (squid beaks), liver, kidney, muscle tissue, intestines, feces from intestinal track, the entire whale head, and a pectoral fin.
Wild said many of these samples will be sent to Kathy Burek at the Alaska Veterinary Pathology Service, a nonprofit organization that runs toxicology and other tests on marine mammals for the National Stranding Network in Alaska. The organization manages a tissue repository for research use.
Researchers held whale boilings in the UAS parking lot. They used a crane to place the whale head in a large metal bin on top of a fire. A smaller pot held the pectoral fin. Clad in gloves, scientists and community volunteers boiled the flesh off of the bones in a standard taxonomic practice. These bones will be utilized for educational purposes.
The next day, the researchers opened up a horizontal freezer in the UAS biology wing. Inside was a white body bag which held the fetus that had been brought back by the campers. The whale fetus was about six feet long and almost two hundred pounds – massive and yet too small and skinny to be a full-term fetus.
They put the fetus in the back of a truck, and drove it up the road to the old SEARHC Mt. Edgecumbe Medical Center, now closed. There, a group of ten or so scientists, students, and curious nurses waited next to the frozen whale for an ER patient to leave the CT room. Technicians ushered the whale in and put it through the machine. “We don’t have a frozen whale protocol,” one of the technicians said.
Wild explained that beaked whales are “very poorly understood in terms of anatomy and physiology.” Whales in general are often too large for CT scans. “The opportunity to conduct one on a small fetus is one that got many people in the marine mammal community very excited.”
In 2018, researchers at San Diego State University waited two years for the opportunity to scan a mink whale in a CT machine usually utilized for solid-fuel rocket engines. This data has been utilized in a number of studies.
The CT scan of the fetus will provide cross sectional images of bones, blood vessels, and soft tissues to be utilized by researchers around the country.
The scanning process took about ten minutes. Then technicians cleaned the machine and the researchers returned the fetus to the freezer. It will remain frozen until November, when scientists will conduct a necropsy during Whale Fest.
All of this work was done by volunteers. Team members, including Dr. Lauren Wild, Dr. Ellen Chenoweth, Willa Johnson, University of Alaska researchers, and Stacey Golden, the Sitka High School biology teacher, have conducted many similar projects.
Cause of death unknown
The whales have been dead nearly a month, and nobody knows how they died. There was no visible strangling from fish nets, apparent injuries from collisions with fishing vessels, bullet wounds or signs of old age.
Wild said that the brain of the female whale was far too decomposed to check for barotrauma (the bends). She said that evidence of barotrauma “would be a very kind of a smoking gun in terms of cause of death.” It would indicate that something spooked that animal when it was in the middle of a dive and that it came up to the surface too quickly. As of now, the researchers, “don't have any reason to believe that's what happened with this animal,” but it is “often a cause of death for beaked whales,” Wild said.
NOAA states that, “Globally, strandings and mass stranding of deep-diving whale species, such as beaked whales, have been causally linked to mid-frequency active sonar (MFAS) use by military operations.”
These mass stranding events often aren't investigated, but after eight Stejneger’s beaked whales were stranded simultaneously in Adak Island in August 2018 researchers investigated their deaths in a paper published in Marine Mammal Science. They found a possible connection between the deaths and confirmed seismic activity in the region, commonly caused by, among other things, seismic surveys and oil and gas exploration.
The Sentinel is awaiting responses from NOAA and the U.S. Navy for the release of any Incidental Harassment Authorization (IHA), Letter of Authorization (LOA), or Final Rule issued to the U.S. Navy or other commercial organizations authorizing the incidental taking of marine mammals in the Gulf of Alaska and/or Inside Passage region of Southeast Alaska that was in effect at any point between April 1, 2026 and June 30, 2026.
• This article originally appeared in the Daily Sitka Sentinel.
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