Carcass of 40-ft whale washes ashore at Uran, near Mumbai

The decomposed body of a 40-foot-long whale washed ashore at Khar Danda in Uran, Navi Mumbai, on Thursday morning. Forest officials said it was most likely a blue whale.

This is the eighth recorded case of a whale carcass washing ashore in Maharashtra since 2015, and the 85th marine animal death over the past three years.

Fishermen from the area said they spotted the carcass around 8.30am. “It looks like the mammal died quite a long while back at sea. You can see bones jutting out of the body,” said Tukaram Koli, a fisherman from Uran. “A dev maso [whale] has washed ashore at Uran coast after almost 40 years. In 1978, a 48-foot-long dead blue whale had washed ashore.”

The blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) falls in the red list of threatened species of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and in schedule 1 of Wildlife Protection Act, 1986. Blue whales are said to be the largest animals ever known to have lived on Earth.

Officials from the Maharashtra mangrove cell have collected tissue samples from the carcass. “It appears to be a blue whale, and is estimated to weigh around 20 tonnes. Our team has collected samples. We will bury the carcass at the site itself,” said N Vasudevan, additional principal chief conservator of forest. “There could be many reasons for its death, including infection, old age, shipping noise, if it was hit by a ship, or if there was any kind of disturbance in the sea.”

Independent experts also said the mammal looks like a blue whale. “It seemed like the blue whale, but it is difficult to assert when it died because the body was severely decomposed,” said Ketki Jog, member, Konkan Cetacean Research Team, who works in the field of marine mammal research along India’s west coast.

Earlier this month, HT had reported on a study conducted by the Maritime Research Centre (MRC), Pune, under the Indian Maritime Foundation. The study found that , owing to increasing ship traffic, has doubled every decade since the 1950s. An increase in noise pollution at sea could be one of the reasons for whale deaths.