- The carcass which is 8-meter long was found near the mouth of the Amazon river on February 2019.
- No wounds has been found anywhere on the body, but there were few clues to explain how this creature ended up so far from the water.
- Specialist still not sure how it ended there, but we’re speculating that the creature was floating too close to the shore and the tide picked it up and slammed it inland into the mangrove.
- Not only was the whale found remarkably far from shore, it was also found in the exact opposite season you’d expect to see humpbacks in this region.
- This humpback was found near the mouth of the Amazon River, some 4,000 miles from its expected feeding grounds, a baffling discovery that has stumped the scientists who found it.
- Looking at the size of the carcass, biologists think the whale is probably a juvenile less than one year old.
- Biologists suspect that the baby whale somehow lost its mother during migration, and that’s why it was left behind in the Amazon basin.
- Another theory is that the baby whale died from ingesting plastic waste and its dead body was washed ashore during a storm.
- The rising humpback population has also increased the odds that one will become entangled in fishing nets or be struck by a ship, believed to be leading causes of their deaths.
Sources:
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-humpback-whale-has-been-found-dead-in-the-amazon-jungle
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/science/humpback-whales-amazon.html
Thank you for posting the source which reveals that this happened in February 2019. In today’s world of fast news and stories being available for a long time, it’s always good to have a date on each page.
Thank you and we have updated the article to show the date of the incident.