© Mary Landers Pilot whale carcass found on Wassaw Island
The 11-foot-long female whale appeared to have washed up on the previous high tide, said John "Crawfish" Crawford, a marine educator and naturalist with Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant.
Georgia's marine mammal coordinator, Department of Natural Resources biologist Clay George, performed a necrospy, or animal autopsy, on the whale Wednesday with assistance from Savannah State University students.
"This is only the second pilot whale to strand in Georgia in past 10 years," George wrote in an email. "Pilot whales are fairly common offshore, but their habitat is so far from shore that they rarely strand on the Georgia coast. We saw no signs of human causes or disease, but it was thin and had no food in its GI tract, so I suspect it died from natural causes. We'll send tissues to a pathologist, but it will be a couple months until we get results back. The marks on the fluke looked like fresh shark bites to me, which isn't unexpected if the whale was in bad shape prior to death."
Pilot whales grow to 18 feet long and can live up to 60 years, according to the Georgia Marine Mammal Stranding network. They live in deep warm waters and are commonly seen at the edge of the continental shelf or canyons, eating mostly squid but also feeding on fish and octopus. They have been documented working together to herd fish into a small group to make feeding easier.
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