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Deceased Oregon Coast Seal Quite a Specimen, Say Experts

 

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4/19/07

Secrets of the Season

Deceased Oregon Coast Seal Quite a Specimen, Say Experts

Elephant seal body (photos: Tiffany Boothe, Seaside Aquarium)

(Cannon Beach, Oregon) – An elephant seal corpse that washed up on the north Oregon coast was an unusual find, clocking in as the largest such creature in this area in nearly 15 years.

Wednesday morning, crews from the Seaside Aquarium responded to a call that an elephant seal had washed ashore about 100 yards from Cannon Beach’s big tourist landmark, Haystack Rock. The creature turned out to be the biggest crewmembers have ever seen, about 10 feet long.

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Aquarium manager Keith Chandler said the find is unusual because this is a nearly fully-grown specimen, which never appear onshore in this area of the Oregon coast. Periodically, elephant seal pups will rest onshore around here, or juvenile males will strand on beaches during their painful molting sometime in their first year, but never adults or elephant seals this size.

“It’s the biggest I’ve ever seen in my 27 years at this job,” Chandler said. “It’s about twice as long and four times as big as we see here.”

Chandler said a Portland man, Leonard Thompson, was walking along the beach early Wednesday morning when he spotted the creature. Thompson told an Associated Press cameraman it was still alive when he spotted it, but Chandler said he doubted that was true.

“We went down there and didn’t see any obvious reason for its death,” Chandler said. “But it was also a gorgeous specimen. Very healthy before it died.”

Chandler said there is a breeding colony of elephant seals on the southern Oregon coast, but once they reach adulthood, they generally stay around there or at least a few hundred miles out to sea if they come up this far north.

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“It’s not normal to see live ones of this size here,” Chandler said. “In the last six or seven years they’ve established this colony on the south coast, but this is an uncommon event. They’re main hub of activity is down around San Francisco. But as their numbers increase on the south coast, we may see more here.”

Tiffany Boothe, an education specialist with the aquarium, said this particular seal wasn’t yet an adult, but close. “Males of this species can reach sizes exceeding 17 feet and weigh more than 4,000 pounds.”

She talked about how these seals were nearly extinct, until recently.

“Elephant seals were hunted to near extinction in the 1800's for their blubber, leaving only 100 to 1,000 individual animals remaining,” Boothe said. “Since their protection, their numbers have increased and today their population has almost been restored to historic levels.”

The crew was there to make sure the creature didn’t wash away at high tides, so they tied it down for the next few days. A necropsy will be conducted on the beach to determine cause of death and to discover other things about the seal. That is planned for Friday, but Chandler said that may not happen until Wednesday.

oregon coast lighthouses on dvd“We tied it down because it’s kind of a steep beach, and the surf is likely to come up again and wash it out,” Chandler said. “We don’t want to have a situation like we did two years ago with the baby sperm whale that washed away and we chased it for like two months.”

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That whale washed up around Hug Point, then drifted back out to sea. Chandler said it was a beautiful specimen when it was first discovered, but by the time they found it again, it was battered and decayed.

Chandler said they aren’t too worried about the public disturbing the corpse, because it blends in well with the surroundings. “It looks like a log, so no one is paying too much attention to it.”

Haystack Rock, Cannon Beach

The necropsy will be conducted by a recent transplant from Florida who now lives in Tillamook. They will be looking at stomach content and other samples of flesh, in order to find out many things about it, including why it may have come up to the north Oregon coast.

When the necropsy is done, Chandler said the bones will be taken from the elephant seal for further study or display somewhere. The parts of the body not used for samples will be buried on the beach at Cannon Beach by city officials, using a backhoe to dig a large pit, where the remains will be covered up.

Cannon Beach is among several coastal towns that have the resources to take care of stranded animals and their remains.

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Feed the seals! One of the oldest aquariums in the U.S. is here in Seaside, Oregon, right on the Promenade