A young sperm whale washed ashore at Luskentyre beach in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides islands last week on 28 November. It was still alive when it stranded but died shortly later.
According to a Facebook post of the Scottish Marine Animal Strandings Scheme, a necropsy found that the dead whale had around 100 kg of plastic and other garbage in his stomach.
“All this material was in a huge ball in the stomach and some of it it looked like it had been there for some time. The animal wasn’t in particularly poor condition, and whilst it is certainly plausible that this amount of debris was a factor in its live stranding, we actually couldn’t find evidence that this had impacted or obstructed the intestines,” the post reads.
“By the time we got to it had been dead for 48 hours and pretty much most of the guts blew out of the side when we stuck a knife in it. Animals this size are so well insulated that even though the temperature outside barely got above freezing, they don’t cool down and hence decompose incredibly quickly.”
The whale was buried at the beach.
