It is true that a whale's tongue can be 3 tons heavy but that of a humpback whale wrecked Wednesday on the steep, rocky shores of Admiralty Island (south of Juneau, southeast Alaska) was really unusual: its swollen tongue was the size of a small car!
It is believed that a collision with a ship forced air into
the humpback's tongue, causing its swelling and the death of the 40-foot (12-meter) male.
"The humpback, an endangered species, also suffered heavy internal bleeding and bruising under its right pectoral fin, suggestive of blunt-force injury. When we flew out to find it, it was on its side struggling to get its blowhole above water. Its tongue was the size of a small car. It is certainly possible that it was a ship strike, but that's still inconclusive," Aleria Jensen, a marine mammal stranding coordinator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Alaska, told the Associated Press.
Initially it was thought that the swelling was caused by an infection. The individual was familiar to the biologists, as it had been observed and numbered by researchers several times since 1992.
60 collisions between ships and large whales have been registered in Alaska since the 1970s. Still the humpback population, currently estimated at 10,000 in the Northern Pacific, is recovering at an annual rate of 7 % since the mid '90s after centuries of intensive whaling. As the whale population increases, this type of collisions could turn more common.
Researchers made a necropsy Friday and they are going to investigate samples of the animal's skin, blubber, stomach contents and other tissues. Once the meat is decomposed, the researchers will search for broken bones.
"The study could take several weeks to complete. There's never any guarantee that we can find the cause of death, but that's always our goal," she Jensen.
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