A 20 metre-long, dead whale was spotted on the front of a cargo vessel while it was sailing, with the vessel being rapidly escorted into Portsmouth so that the authorities were able to lift off the mammal and take it for examination.
Specifically, the mammal was lifted off with a crane and taken to a specialist plant where it will be examined. Its remains were also removed from the front of the cargo ship.
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The whale was spotted by a pilot boat crew on the front of the Cote d’Ivoirian Star as it approached the UK. The vessel, which was transferring fruit from West Africa, remained seven hours anchored off the east coast of the Isle of Wight during coast guard’s investigation.
In the meantime, the campaign group ORCA believes it may have happened as the ship passed through a hotspot for fin whales in the Bay of Biscay.
Ben McInnes, Portsmouth’s harbour master, cited to BBC that it remains unknown whether the whale was hit by the vessel of if it was already dead when it came into contact.
Moreover, the whale has been transmitted to Essex in a facility with expertise in animal waste, with the latter to be examined by experts from the Institute of Zoology’s cetacean strandings programme.
Overall, the event of vessel-whale collision is not a first; It has been reported that ship strikes are one of the main human-induced threats to whale survival. Thus, a paper launched in late December presented the use of a systematic risk assessment methodology, namely the FSA, to evaluate measures to reduce the risk of collisions between ships and whales.