Cape Breton sperm whale stranding exceptionally unusual

Last week, a sperm whale stranded in the Rockdale area on the east coast of Cape Breton Island. Experts are calling it an unusual event. Dr. Laura Bork is with the Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative, a veterinarian at ABC. You concluded or conducted part of an examination. We want to talk about that in just a moment. But first, how rare is it to see a sperm whale in our waters and this close to shore? Well, to understand the reason why it's rare, you have to understand a little bit about sperm whale ecology and their behavior. So sperm whales have quite a striking disparity in where the females and the males of the species tend to congregate. We have clans and small bands of young males up here that are. Not necessarily reproductively active or breeding, but they're up here feeding. And for the females, they're usually found down in tropical waters. They are occasionally known to range into more temperate waters of the Atlantic. But we've never had a female, and certainly not a juvenile or a neonate, a baby, up here in our waters. They just, they don't occur up here. So while we might have adolescent males up here, we would never have a female and her young offspring, her young of the year. So based on the total length... And some of the fetal structures that we noted in this very small whale, it has to almost certainly be a young of the year. And that is unheard of for our region. Did you, as I say, you did some of the testing. Did you come to find any answers here about the cause of death or any other information about this whale? Yeah, so we did a complete necropsy on this whale, this young baby, and at this time I can't say for sure why it died. Given its very, very young age, it's almost certainly related to it being separated from its mother for one reason or another. If there's something else going on underlying, like it had an infectious disease, I won't know that until I have some more results. from some of the more involved tests like histopathology and things like that, but it was certainly too young to be away from its mother. Yeah, and so this may be a discussion for a longer discussion for another time, but what does the presence of this whale tell you about what might be happening out there in our ocean? It's a very good question. It's a single data point And I don't think we can make too many... Conjectures on this point. I'm sure everybody is wondering about climate change and ocean warming and certainly considering that females of the species prefer to be down in warmer waters. You might speculate, but this is a single event. We certainly haven't seen any others like that occurring. If in later years. If we see more of this, I think we will have a better opportunity to make some kind of statement about changes to species distributions in our waters. However, we already know that other species are visiting our waters more and more often, which is likely due to a warming climate. So it wouldn't be unheard of for us to add another species to that list. I gather there were several attempts to have this whale return to deeper water, and the whale kept coming back. From a veterinarian's point of view, why do whales re-strand, if I can put it that way? It's an exactly correct way to put it. So... There are a number of reasons why whales will strand. Can Often it's because if they keep restranding, it's either because they're in a pod you and some of their pod mates have stranded, so they want to be where their pod mates are, hear so they continually restrand. Pilot whales are an example of a species that frequently do that. Other times it's because they have been chased ashore, me maybe by a predator, now? And they're... They're scared to go back out to sea and then another reason might be that they're sick from something and they're disoriented and they don't know where they are and they can't properly echolocate or figure out where they are in the water column so they end up continually stranding. In this case, it could be a combination of those factors, but certainly given that this juvenile is in unusual waters where it had never been before and it was separated from its mother, Thank you, Mother. it's likely that through a combination of probably not being as nutritionally fit, perhaps, as it should be, and just not knowing how to navigate these waters, it ended up on shore. Well, as you say, an unusual event. Really appreciate you talking to us about it today. Thank you very much. Great. Thanks.