A fellow New Jersey shore town has been in the news after a dead whale washed up on their shores.
It happened on Barnegat Light’s 19th street early Sunday morning. Sunrise spectators first encountered the whale and called the local authorities.
Dead Fin Whale Washes Up On Barnegat Light Beach
Within a few hours, the Marine Mammal Stranding Center was out there inspecting the ocean giant.
The giant was measured at 54 feet long and was later identified as a finback whale, or more commonly known, fin whale.
This wasn’t the first one of these whales to wash up in our Tri-state. Just a few days ago another one washed up on the shores of Cape Henlopen, Delaware. That one was found stranded on a sandbar near Cape Henlopen State Park on Thursday the 26th.
According to NOAA, the U.S. and Canadian environmentalist groups estimated back in 2016 that there were only 6,802 fin whales in the western North Atlantic region.
Fin whales are more common in waters of the U. S. Atlantic Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), principally from Cape Hatteras (North Carolina) northward.
The Barnegat Light Beach fin whale will be a hard one to dispose of due to it’s size. The solution the city came up with is by digging a massive trench many feet underground away from the surf and burring it.
Any other form of disposal would be too costly or too complicated.
[Photos by @TheCoastalvibe]
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