Officials along the New Jersey shore were trying to figure out how to remove a 31-foot, 15-ton whale that washed ashore Christmas Eve after realizing that the carcass of the sea creature was frozen and therefore not easily cut into smaller pieces.
"It's frozen solid," said Bob Schoelkopf, co-director of the Marine Mammal Stranding Center, according to Fox’s New York City affiliate WNYW. "There's not much we can do. Cutting into a frozen whale like that isn't going to be easy."
The corpse of the humpback whale came to rest near the rock jetty at the Barnegat Inlet at Barnegat Lighthouse State Park, home to one of the Jersey Shore’s iconic lighthouses.
Schoelkopf said that the whale had been spotted earlier this year feeding in Sandy Hook Bay about 70 miles away. There were no signs of physical injury, such as being hit by the propeller of a ship — at least on the parts that are visible — but it had been exposed to freezing temperatures for several days over the weekend.
"The whale’s too frozen," Schoelkopf said. "We can’t even cut into the blubber. It’s too thick and frozen."
Officials were planning on using two front-end loaders to lift the carcass whole onto a truck so it can be moved for a necropsy so that the cause of death can be determined.
“They’ll look and see if they can find a cause of death, which may have been a prop hit,” Schoelkopf told The Sandpaper.
A different whale washed up on shore dead in September and then another in Cape May in November.
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