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A whale died after being trapped under a jetty at Hobsonville Point in Auckland.
The general manager of the Marine Mammal Rescue Charity Project Jonah Daren Grover said a member of the public saw the whale struggling under the jetty at around 2 p.m. and unable to get out.
“We were called to the site together with the Department of Conservation, but unfortunately, although we were there in half an hour, the whale had already died.”
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The young whale was lifted out of the water by a crane.
Grover said the whale would have been very distressed and had been cut by shells at the bottom of the jetty.
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“I’ve never heard of a whale getting stuck like this before, it’s very unusual, but just one of those things,” Grover said.
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Workers from the NZDF and DOC helped move the whale’s carcass.
The whale was blessed by a local iwi, and scientists at Massey University took samples before they moved it to the boat ramp.
Glen Wilcox Ngāti Whātua Kaumata said that in Maori culture the death of a whale like this was seen as an omen that something would happen.
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It was believed that the whale was not yet fully developed.
“We looked at what that could mean, we normally don’t have a lot of whale kills or strandings in Auckland, it’s very rare, especially in these conditions,” Wilcox said.
Killer whales had been seen in Upper Harbor over the weekend, Wilcox said, so it was possible the whale had gotten scared and then got stuck.
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The NZDF workers wrapped the whale inside a blue tarp.
“When the tide returned, the whale could not get out and we believe it drowned.”
The size of the whale indicates that it has not yet fully grown, Wilcox said.
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The carcass of the whale was pulled out of the water and brought to the dock.
Scientists from the Albany campus of Massey University took skin, fat and muscle samples for the research.
They will be used to determine where the female whale had been feeding and to check for toxins.
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Before its death, the whale struggled so hard that it was covered in scratches and wounds.
The whale is believed to be an Antarctic minke whale, about four meters in length, almost always found in the southern hemisphere.
