Rare whale that visited Seattle washes up dead in Canada

A fin whale spotted off Seattle and Whidbey Island in January has washed up dead northwest of Vancouver, British Columbia.

Standing in the rain next to a carcass the size of a school bus, members of the shíshálh Nation held a memorial ceremony in a rocky cove near Pender Harbour on B.C.’s Sunshine Coast.

In shíshálh culture, whales are considered family.

The mourners brushed the beached carcass with cedar boughs on the low tide before letting researchers cut into it to figure out what killed this young giant, believed to be about two years old.

At 40 feet long, it was just half the size of a full-grown fin whale.

Fin whales are the world’s second largest animal. Only blue whales are more massive.

“We’re here today, again, to show our respect to this member of our family,” Sid Quinn, head of resource management for the shíshálh Nation, told onlookers.

After brushing the whale from baleen to tail, Quinn carried the cedar branches down to the water’s edge, then tossed them into the sea to float away on the tide.

He lifted his hands in a gesture of thanks.

Paul Cottrell with Fisheries and Oceans Canada estimated the whale died around March 15, five days before researchers in disposable jumpsuits and gloves took a power saw to it to examine it inside and out.

“One cannot express in pictures or words the smell associated with a whale necropsy,” marine mammal researcher Carla Crossman wrote after conducting an arms-deep examination of a dead fin whale in Vancouver in 2015.

Early results, according to the Coast Reporter of Sechelt, B.C., suggest the Pender Harbour whale died of blunt force trauma, most likely a ship strike — a frequent cause of death for larger whales.

Though their populations are rebounding from heavy depredation by whalers in the early 20th century, Pacific Ocean fin whales are listed as an endangered species in the United States and a species of special concern in Canada.

Canadian wildlife officials say collisions with cruise ships and other vessels and underwater noise from shipping are the main threats to fin whales in the Pacific Ocean.

“Multiple cases of fin whale carcasses being carried into ports on the bows of ships have been documented along both east and west coasts, although the actual rate of mortality is uncertain,” according to the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada.

The streamlined swimmers, sometimes called "greyhounds of the sea," can reach speeds of 25 miles per hour, faster than many ships.

Researchers were able to confirm the fin whale that washed up in Pender Harbour, about 40 miles northwest of Vancouver, was the same animal seen in Seattle in January. It had a distinctive hole in its dorsal fin and a small scar from a cookie-cutter shark on its flank.

Cookie-cutters are diminutive sharks, about two feet long, that feed by taking small bites out of much larger prey, even some of the world's largest animals.