Yesterday I wrote about the Pacific gray whale that had been hanging out at our very own Dana Point Harbor and that Sea World Marine Biologists had been able to free her from netting and ropes that apparenetly went from her mouth to her tail.
Even though she perked up and swam out to sea, it seems that she's returned again this morning and probably doesn't have the energy reserves to make it the rest of the way back to her feeding grounds in the Arctic.
Its reappearance in Dana Point harbor at 7:15 a.m. Thursday was reported by Mike Bursk, a marine biologist and captain of the research boat Sea Explorer from the Ocean Institute
"Nothing has changed," he said. "It's very lethargic and tired ... There's absolutely nothing mankind can do right now."
While Bursk said he believes the whale is probably more than 25 years old, rescuers on Wednesday had pegged its age at between 1 and 2 years old.
"It's got the worst curvature I've ever seen," he said. "It may be destined to die young."
So, more questions than answers, this may not be the old man and the sea but a young whale who lost her way and just got tangled up in one of our messes left behind. And sadly, there is nothing scientists say we can do, not a damn thing.
She doesn't have the energy to make it the rest of the way and may be resting or waiting to die. We don't know and can't know and it kills me that there is nothing we can do for her as she swims in and out of Dana Point Harbor, just fifteen minutes from my home.
Wildlife biologist Joe Cordaro with National Marines Fisheries, which coordinated a rescue effort that led to disentanglement of the mammal from gill netting and nylon rope on Wednesday witnessed by hundreds in the harbor, said that the agency will take a hands-off approach now.
"At this point nobody with any team should be doing anything," he said. "The only time we're going to do something different now is should the whale get so weak (that) it's stranded. As long as it's swimming on its own power, nobody should be doing anything with it."
As such no one is to go within 100 yards of Lilly, a name rescuers gave the mammal.
Gray whales are baleen whales and they feed on the tiniest creatures in the sea from krill to squid and even smaller creatures that fall under the heading of amphipods. They used their tongues to push the silt and sand through the baleen to keep everything but the food in their mouths. And this poor whale has been on her (Lilly?) migrational fast relying on stores of blubber for the energy to make the migration North to cooler waters to fatten up this summer.
MICHAEL GOULDING, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
According the LA Weekly, they are taking some of the skin that came off of her (The second photo above, the marine biologist who helped cut her free is holding a piece of her skin that came off) and testing it to see if it is in fact a she. For now though, she will be protected and they are going to keep people away from her. I don't think a lot of the photos show just how badly she's doing. But if her skin is coming off so easily, it's covered in lice and barnacles and she's as frail as she looks from some of the photos (compared to other photos of gray whales), she indeed needs some good thoughts.
It's not as if our oceans face enough threats as it as it. With each passing day the headlines grow more dire for the Gulf. And as Lily shows, it's not as if these creatures don't have enough to contend with, such as noise pollution, water pollution and whaling. They have human debris that is left from us overfishing the ocean and now this. THIS:
Where's The Oil? Your Government Doesn't Really Know
For more than three weeks now, crude oil has been erupting out of a pipe a mile underneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. A new analysis of seafloor video indicates that nearly 70,000 barrels could be gushing out every day, NPR reports. That figure is at least 10 times the U.S. Coast Guard's original estimate of the flow, and "the equivalent of one Exxon Valdez tanker every four days."
And nobody really knows where it is, or where it's headed.
Federal officials are carefully tracking the trajectory of the oil that's made it to the water's surface and, increasingly, on shore. They even put out a daily map.
But there's never been an oil spill this big and this deep before. Nor have authorities ever used chemical dispersants so widely.
As a result, some scientists suspect that a lot, if not most, of the oil is lurking below the surface rather than on it, in a gigantic underwater plume the size and trajectory of which remain largely a mystery.
Do you think it will remain a mystery for whales or dolphins or the millions of other animals that will die because of this enormous catastrophe? Our hubris, our greed and our feeling that the resources are ours to take and damn the consequences. Damn the people of the gulf who rely on these beautiful ecosystems for their livelihood, damn the creatures, microscopic to humongous, damn them all.
There hasn't been a day in the past week that I haven't found myself crying because of this and feeling so fucking useless to do a damn thing.
And I can't even help Lily, this poor Gray Whale, who came for help and we cannot even feed her. Another creature, beyond our help.