A baby whale’s inaugural cruise through Big Apple waters ended in tragedy over the weekend after its slashed and bloodied body beached on the shores of New Jersey.
The still-breathing behemoth suffered at least two excruciating nights trapped on a Long Beach Island sandbar before it succumbed to its injuries — just hours before rescuers planned to deliver a euthanasia injection.
“Our entire team is deeply saddened by every deceased animal that we investigate, but the ones that hit the hardest are animals like this young whale who never got the chance to contribute to their species,” the Marine Mammal Stranding Center, based in Brigantine, wrote on Facebook Monday.
A juvenile humpback whale died Sunday after it beached on a New Jersey sandbar. Marine Mammal Stranding Center
The doomed juvenile humpback was first spotted off the coast of Holgate around 3 p.m. Friday — two weeks after marine research group Gotham Whale saw it struggling to hunt near Rockaway.
The 29-foot-long animal was trapped in the shallow water and was clearly in rough shape.
It was “lethargic and in very thin body condition,” rescuers said, adding that it had “wounds consistent with a previous propeller strike were present across both the left and right dorsal side of the whale.”
Additionally, beaching can be a death sentence for leviathans, whose organs become crushed under their own body weight without the buoyancy of water to support them.
The doomed whale was covered in slashes from a boat propeller. Marine Mammal Stranding Center
It’s not clear how long the baby humpback was on the LBI sandbar before it was spotted Friday.
“After the medical assessment it was determined that the whale’s prognosis was extremely poor and was unlikely to survive,” the Marine Mammal Stranding Center wrote.
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“The decision was made to humanely euthanize the whale to prevent further suffering.”
That’s when Mother Nature cruelly intervened — nightfall prevented rescuers from reaching the whale on the boat-only-accessible sandbar until Saturday morning.
Then, significant beach erosion from a nor’easter earlier this month halted plans to relocate the dying animal onto the mainland, where rescuers could deliver the merciful elixir — a crucial step that prevents the euthanasia toxins from seeping into the environment or being passed on to other animals that would feed on the whale’s carcass.
Instead, rescuers slipped the baby leviathan sedatives to keep it comfortable until Sunday morning.
By that time, however, the poor animal had passed away.
The poor animal was apparently on its very first voyage through the New York Bight — the waters from Fire Island to the Manasquan Inlet in New Jersey.
The juvenile was first spotted swimming in Big Apple waters on Oct. 2. NOAA Fisheries
Gotham Whale cataloged the baby as NYC0476 on Oct. 2 and immediately noted that it was suffering from “significant trauma, showing injuries from either one or two propeller strikes.”
“These wounds have understandably impacted this whale’s ability to feed, as they are quite a bit skinnier than others in the area,” the marine research group noted.
The whale was spotted a second time two days later and then vanished.
Whale sightings in Big Apple waters have been on the rise in recent years — but so have boat strikes.
The fatal collisions reached a peak of 11 in 2023, the most recent year for which the data is available.
Last year, the strikes claimed the life of another young humpback whale that had made a name for herself as a playful and acrobatic leviathan who threw spectacular tail flips in the shadow of the city skyline.