Skip to content

UPDATED: Dead fin whale pulled ashore in North Vancouver

A team of about 15 marine mammal scientists pulled on their rubber raingear and spent almost four hours examining a massive fin whale carcass at Seaspan’s shipyard Monday afternoon, looking for clues about how the giant animal died.

A team of about 15 marine mammal scientists pulled on their rubber raingear and spent almost four hours examining a massive fin whale carcass at Seaspan’s shipyard Monday afternoon, looking for clues about how the giant animal died.

The 14-metre-long body of the young male fin whale first came into Burrard Inlet Sunday, caught on the bulbous bow of the Seven Seas Navigator cruise ship from Alaska. The whale was only spotted as the cruise ship came into dock, when it slipped off the bow and into the inlet.

Scientists don’t yet know if the whale was alive or already dead when it was hit by the cruise ship. That’s one of the questions they’re hoping the necropsy carried out in North Vancouver Monday will answer.

Department of Fisheries and Oceans staff arranged to have the whale’s body towed over to Seaspan where they used the shipyard’s syncrolift — usually used for lifting vessels in and out of the water — to hoist the whale, estimated to weigh 40 tonnes — in to the yard.

There, an examination of the dead whale was conducted by an expert in marine mammal necropsies and scientists from DFO, the Vancouver Aquarium and the University of British Columbia’s zoology department. Results from the tissue samples, combined with information from the cruise ship about its course, should help spell out what happened, said Paul Cottrell, Pacific marine mammal co-ordinator for the DFO.Preliminary results could be known in a couple of weeks, he said.

Fin whales are the second largest mammal on the planet, after the blue whale, and are listed as threatened in British Columbia. They are baleen filter feeders, like humpback whales, and fast swimmers — capable of sustaining speeds of close to 40 kilometres an hour in the water.

“They are the greyhounds of the sea,” said Cottrell.

But for reasons scientists don’t really understand, fin whales are also particularly susceptible to being hit by ships. Dead fin whales have come into Burrard Inlet twice before on the bows of cruise ships in the past 15 years — in 1999 and 2009. In the 2009 case, an examination of the whale’s body showed it was dead before it got caught on the cruise ship, said Cottrell.

The population of fin whales was decimated by commercial whaling at the turn of the last century. Since then, the number of individual fin whales identified in B.C. waters has reached about 500, although there may be many more whales scientists don’t know about. The two main threats to the population are vessel strikes and entanglements in fishing gear.

Because of its size, Cottrell said this whale hadn’t yet reached full maturity, which usually happens at about 25 years. Fin whales can live to over 90.

The whales usually migrate in offshore waters, and are rarely seen in Georgia Strait, so it’s more likely the whale got hooked on the bow in waters off the central coast, said Cottrell.

After scientists finished examining the whale, it was lifted back into the water and towed by a Seaspan tug to the west coast of Vancouver Island, where it was sunk at a location picked by DFO, said Cottrell.

The cost was paid by the cruise ship involved in the collision with the whale.

Cottrell said if scientists find hotspots where fin whales are colliding with ships, the government might look at speed reductions in those areas.