The carcass of a 30-tonne fin whale that died after being beached in Bridlington has been removed in an operation described as the “largest of its kind” the local council has ever carried out.
The 17m whale became a macabre tourist attraction on Bridlington’s South Beach after it died on Tuesday evening during attempts to return it to the sea.
Security staff were deployed to keep crowds away from a police cordon, which was put in place on Wednesday to manage the large number of visitors, some of whom had reportedly travelled many miles to see the creature and take selfies with it.
Zoologists still do not know what caused the whale, believed to be a juvenile male, to beach itself. Fin whales are the second-longest animal after the blue whale and are rarely seen in the shallow waters of the North Sea as they are usually found in much deeper oceans. An autopsy will be carried out to try to determine the cause of death.
John Bennett, who was one of the first people to see the stranded whale on Tuesday, told ITV: “You could see that it was still alive, it was still blowing water out of its hole and you could see the tail flapping. It was obviously in some kind of distress. I found out this morning they weren’t able to save it.
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“You don’t expect to see anything like it, especially in Bridlington. Sad to see it like this but, wow, what a thing to see – it’s amazing.”
East Riding of Yorkshire council managed to remove the body whole, after concerns it would have to be dissected to be taken away. Council workers used diggers with tracks and other heavy lifting equipment to pick up the carcass and move it to a large flatbed truck. Roads and slipways to the beach were closed for the operation.
Occasionally, the bodies of beached whales will be washed away by tides but when that does not happen they become a public safety risk, having been known to explode when decomposing.
They also become the target of thieves wanting to benefit from the illegal trade in body parts of protected species, which was the case in 2020 when the jaw bones of a pod of sperm whales that died on the North Yorkshire coast were removed overnight.