A full grown humpback whale washed ashore near Cape Falcon on the Oregon coast.
Tiffany Boothe
A whale that washed up on the northern Oregon coast this weekend has washed back out to sea.
Tiffany Boothe with the Seaside Aquarium was planning to perform a necropsy on the humpback whale Monday, but when she got to the beach, the whale had disappeared. Almost.
"There was a kidney. At that point that was really the only trace," she said.
The whale, which had been decomposing for some time before it washed ashore, was bloated and filled with gas. That gas pushed the whale's stomach and kidney out of its mouth and onto the beach before it washed back out to sea.
The whale's kidney remained on the shore.
Tiffany Boothe
As part of its work with the Marine Mammal Stranding Network, the aquarium performs necropsies on all marine mammals that wash up on the shore.
The group look for signs of changes in the ocean or indications that animals are getting tangled in nets or hit by boats. While dead sea lions and seals are common, whales only turn up on the Oregon coast once or twice a year.
The necropsy team was "bummed and relieved" the rest of the whale had disappeared.
"Whale necropsies are really hard. They're time consuming, and you're dealing with a lot of really really heavy flesh and blubber," Boothe said. A full grown humpback whale can weigh up to 40 tons.
Booth said an unrelated group of several live humpback whales have been spotted in the Columbia River at high tide this week. They're coming to feed on schools of small fish.