Baby whale dies in Brooklyn canal

(New York - WABC, April 18, 2007) (WABC) -- A young whale thrashed the water, beached itself at an oil depot dock and died suddenly on Wednesday after two days of swimming aimlessly in a small bay off an industrial section of Brooklyn.

Animal activists said the minke whale, about a year old, had been too young to survive on its own.

"It's very sad," said Kim Durham, a rescue specialist at the Long Island-based Riverhead Foundation for Research and Preservation, who had monitored the troubled animal's activities around the clock.

"It was a very young whale that became confused and disoriented," Durham said.

A police harbor boat secured the whale's carcass, estimated to weigh about 3,500 to 5,000 pounds, to the Hess Oil Company dock.

A spokesman said it will be towed to an Army Corps of Engineers dock at Caven Point, in Jersey City, New Jersey, tomorrow for a necropsy by Riverhead marine experts.

The whale was first spotted on Tuesday in Gowanus Bay, a small estuary off industrial south Brooklyn that is the outlet from the Gowanus canal, a narrow 1.15-mile waterway once lined with pollution-generating coal yards, scrap yards and small industries.

The canal actually has improved in recent years due to environmental cleanup efforts. After a huge underwater fan, designed to keep the water flowing, was reactivated, crabs and other marine creatures began turning up. But Robert Guskind, founder of Gowanuslounge.com, said the recent Nor'easter would have sent more raw sewage into the canal, something he said always occurs with major storms.

He said the whale story had generated a lot of traffic on his Web site. "People are concerned abut the creature's ability to survive," he said. "Quite honestly it could not have picked a worse spot."

Guskind and Durham disputed media reports that the animal was ever inside the canal proper. "I don't know how that got started. I was there with it all day and I was never in the canal," Durham said. "One of our concerns is that it might try to go there. There would be no way to prevent it."

Guskind's Web site includes a map showing the whale in the waters generally called Gowanus Bay, defined by a highway bridge that spans the canal exit.

"More recently, it has been reported nearer to the Home Depot," noted one update.

Like the Gowanus canal, the outlet is lined with docks, storage warehouses and a large fuel oil depot, but has enough room for a whale to turn around in its 30-foot depths. The canal is shallower and so narrow that a large mammal might have problems making a U-turn.

Minke whales are a subspecies of baleen whales, common in northern Atlantic waters, and feed on plankton and krill.

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