Cruise Liner Unwittingly Drags Giant Dead Whale Into Port

A gruesome scene played out in Vancouver over the weekend as a 950-foot cruise ship pulled into the city’s Canada Place port with 70-foot fin whale impaled on its bow. The animal’s enormous carcass required two tug boats to pull it free of the boat, before divers could recover it for testing. Fin whales are the second largest animals on earth and are classified as a threatened species.

It’s not clear where the Sapphire Princess, which was coming south from Alaska, hit the whale, but speculation centered on the sea lanes north of Vancouver Island. The coastal waters between southern Alaska and Seattle are both rich in marine life and heavily-trafficked by cruise vessels and oil tankers. In 1999, a Celebrity cruise liner killed a fin whale in the same area.

The broader subject of whales’ grim situation in the today’s oceans is in the air anyway, as it was explored in depth a couple of weeks ago in a fine magazine article by Charles Seibert. Besides the dangers ship hulls and human garbage, naval sonar tests seem to be so painful to the animals that they apparently try to dive very deep to escape the racket and wind up getting the bends (something scientists had previously not thought possible for whales). In this case, it’s not unreasonable to think that noise from the ship’s engines and propeller might have played some role in disorienting the creature.

By the way, the lead in line on that video–the ship coming into port “with an extra passenger”–how tone deaf is that?

Map: BBC