A dead 50-foot gray whale washed ashore in Huntington Beach on Friday, according to officials with the Pacific Marine Mammal Center.
The cause of death of the young adult female is not yet known, said Glenn Gray, chief executive of the Laguna Beach-based nonprofit. Employees of the center performed a necropsy of the body on Saturday morning.
The whale had no signs of physical injury, Gray said. Such marks are typically seen if a whale is struck by a boat, bitten by a shark or entangled in fishing gear.
Samples from the body have been sent to a lab for testing.
“It may take a couple weeks,” he said. “We’ll share with the public what we know.”
Scientists say gray whales have been dying in large numbers this year.
At least 70 whales have died since the beginning of the year in the lagoons of Baja California in Mexico, where they go in the winter, according to Steven Swartz, a marine scientist who studies gray whales.
The whales are now headed north to their summer feeding grounds in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions.
In recent weeks, three gray whales have died in San Francisco Bay.
Researchers aren’t sure why higher numbers of whales are dying. The bodies of some of the dead whales have appeared depleted and malnourished, leading some scientists to believe the problem could be a lack of food.
Alisa Schulman-Janiger, who has led the Los Angeles chapter of the American Cetacean Society’s gray whale census at Rancho Palos Verdes since 1979, said the number of whales she and her volunteers have observed migrating north this spring and swimming south this past winter is the lowest on record.
Earlier this month, a minke whale that spent days swimming in Long Beach Harbor died — despite efforts by marine wildlife experts to reroute it back to deeper waters.
Investigators with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were trying to determine what caused the minke whale’s death.
