Cruise ship was alarmed when it spotted a 50,000-pound dead whale stuck to the front, apparently after it came down and died

“It looks like the animal was alive and was hit by a ship.”

Whale story

A cruise ship pulled into port Saturday with a surprising and smelly stowaway on its bow: a dead and rotting whale New York Times Reports.

And preliminary signs from an investigation suggest the aquatic mammal – an endangered sei whale weighing a whopping 50,000 pounds – was killed when struck by the ship because it had a broken right fin and trauma to its right shoulder blade.

“It looks like the animal was alive and was hit by a ship,” said Robert A. DiGiovanni, chief scientist of the Atlantic Marine Conservation Society NYT.

Red tide

The cruise ship was en route to the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal when authorities found the whale on its bow NYT Reports. A boat later towed the whale to Sandy Hook Beach in New Jersey, where it was subjected to a necropsy by the conservation society.

Sei whales, a species of baleen whale that can weigh up to 100,000 pounds and measure 40 to 60 feet long, are considered endangered because the commercial whaling industry began targeting them in the 1960s — yes, that late — after stocks plummeted Blue whales and humpback whales were depleted whales that became protected species.

From the mid-1960s to the 1970s, whalers killed sei whales en masse until today there are only an estimated 57,000 to 65,000 left in the wild. It is estimated that the whaling industry, which hunted sei whales for meat and oil, killed 300,000 sei whales in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The gentle giants still face dangers, including getting tangled in fishing gear and being hit by ships like the cruise ship that came into port on Saturday.

“If you’re out there, these animals could be there,” he told the NYT. “We need to make people more aware of how to treat these animals.”

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