January 13, 2023 — This whale was bound to draw attention.
Unlike a similar one that washed up a month ago in Strathmere, a sleepy barrier island hamlet in Cape May County, this 33.5-foot female humpback rolled ashore on Saturday morning on Atlantic City’s downtown beach. Twenty-four hours later, its carcass, by then dozed up to the edge of the dunes, where it would soon be buried, was surrounded by small plastic campaign signs imploring onlookers to “Protect Our Coast: Stop the industrialization of our oceans.”
The placards, colored in red, white and blue, were a clear indication that the whale was now a reeking lightning rod for a growing anti-wind farm movement in South Jersey. But, say experts, the stranded whales highlight the complex ecology of the species and the busy waters in which they live, and that not one factor is to blame but many — some of which even they still don’t fully understand.
The whale was the sixth to wash up dead or dying on New Jersey and New York beaches in 33 days. Two — an adult female humpback and a female sperm whale — appeared on Long Island shorelines in early December. In New Jersey, an infant sperm whale was discovered in Keansburg, Monmouth County, in early December, while the three other strandings, all humpbacks, were in South Jersey. Saturday’s incident was the second in Atlantic City in two weeks; a similar sized humpback washed up not far away on Dec. 23. In July, a 25-foot humpback also beached in North Wildwood.
On Monday, standing before a podium set up on the sand, directly above where Saturday’s humpback was buried, the smell of decomposition still hanging in the air, Clean Ocean Action’s executive director, Cindy Zipf, announced that the advocacy group, along with others, had prepared a letter to President Joseph Biden, calling on him “to take immediate steps to address this alarming and environmentally harmful trend.”
“Clean Ocean Action has been working to protect these waters for about the last 40 years, and never have we ever heard of six whales washing up within 33 days,” Zipf said. “The only thing different this year than in the past years is the enormous amount of offshore preconstruction and development activities occurring by the offshore wind industry.”