Dead Whale Spotted In New York Waters
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Coast Guard officials spent yesterday searching for a dead whale spotted floating in a busy shipping lane south of New York Harbor.
Officials said that a passing boat had called in the sighting south of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and though helicopter sweeps were done of the area, no whale was found.
“It may have drifted, it may have sank, we don’t know,” a Coast Guard official said.
A spokeswoman for the National Marine Fisheries Service, Connie Barclay, said the animal was likely to be a humpback whale, sei whale, or fin whale, as those species commonly feed in New York waters during the summer.
It’s rare to find a whale so close to the city’s harbor, an assistant stranding coordinator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Ulrika Mamone, said.
“We do get one or two a year in the shipping lanes heading in,” she said. “This one was quite close.”
Last year, a 12-foot-long minke whale was spotted in the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, where it stayed for several days before dying.
