Doomed Baby Humpback Shot in the Hamptons

Wildlife officials decided early on that a baby humpback  beached in the Hamptons was doomed have finally shot it to death, days after it was found and started drawing sympathetic crowds. The whale created a weird whale-watching spectacle with hundreds visiting Main Beach in East Hampton for a curious, sad vigil. Everyone wanted to find some way to save the whale, but without its mother or some supersized facility, it wouldn't work.

Euthanizing the whale didn't go too smoothly: the New York Post denies it died.  The Huffington Post says it died overnight. Gothamist quotes subscription-required Newsday saying shots rang out. But an earlier story says they were using darts, not some kind of Old Yeller euthanasia pistol. Carissa Katz writes in The East Hampton Star that they used a highly specialized kind of dart to deliver an overdose of sedatives, first Wednesday, then again on Thursday:

The darts the system uses are designed to go through the whale’s blubber and into muscle. The whale is estimated to weigh about 10,000 pounds. The amount of the drug needed to sedate an animal that size is “enough to kill 100 people,” [David Morin, a marine mammal biologist with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration] said. 

Whale beaching is still a mystery. They'll do a necropsy--the animal equivalent of an autopsy. The Sag Harbor Express said earlier in the week that they'll do the necropsy on site and probably bury it there, too.It may be the whale was sick or injured. Or it could have lost its mother, whom it needs for milk. Even the wolf-killing, Sarah Palin-loving state of Alaska says humans are usually somehow to blame for humpback whale deaths--either through fishing line entanglements, boat collisions or toxins.

The Riverhead Foundation says they handled 40 cetacean (which includes dolphins, porpoises and whales) strandings in 2008.

Where to Go to See Whales
Where to See Animals Around New York City

Plum Island (Creepy Animal Research Lab and Would-Be Hannibal Lecter Beach) Lives On

Plum Island--New York's answer to Area 51--will live on a bit longer. The secretive federal animal research lab off the north fork of Long Island got a bit of a reprieve when Congress decided not to fund its replacement in Kansas, the Suffolk Times reports.

The clandestine, off-limits island, once the home of classified bio-weapons testing, is the kind of place only a Dick Cheney could love. Well, him and Hannibal Lecter; the Silence of the Lambs serial killer is offered a week's annual vacation at the island lab. "Charming," he says, but later refers to it as "Anthrax Island."

The whole range of research done there may never be quite public, but it has worried mainland locals, especially after an outbreak of foot and mouth disease and a hurricane power outage (since the island holds stores of some pretty nasty diseases.) Lab 257 (named after the main building), a book by Michael Carroll, claimed secretive, shoddy work at the lab was tied to the original lyme disease and other outbreaks, which the military shrugged off as "fringe" theories. Most of the interest is probably because we can't visit. But we can see the complex from Orient Point or the ferry to Connecticut.

The problem with the lab now is that some think it's too small to handle modern work and that hoof and mouth program should move to Kansas. But the GAO isn't too sure about moving the lab to the mainland, especially the middle of livestock country.

Speculation on what would happen after it closed, center on safer more boring kinds of green energy labs, a wind farm or luxury properties, according to the Times. I'd rather see it as a wildlife refuge, but if it follows the path of the decommissioned Governor's Island, it'll pretty much do nothing for a long time while debate plans.

New Photos of Montauk Monster Make it Look a Lot Less Monstrous, more like a feral pig

Newsday's Joyce Brown obtained new photos of the Montauk Monster from beach goer Christina Pampalone, who was on the fateful Montauk beach where the Monster washed up a couple weeks ago. Brown explains that the corpse was washing back and forth in the waves, so Pampalone got a shot from a different angle.

Pampalone must have gone through exquisite torture the last few days knowing she had much more revealing photos. Then again, if her photo came out first we all wouldn't have been so enthralled and would've had to get some work done this week.
Also, I have to wonder if the original shot was provocatively chosen to make it look like a beak. (And if so, say thanks for the mindless summer diversion.)

Yesterday we discussed how the first shot showed a beak, but with teeth, ruling out the theory that it was a turtle without a shell. Pampalone's photo shows that it's not really a beak at all, but the exposed nasal cavity. Also, it shows HUGE lower canine teeth. And fur. And ears.

With the new photo, I'm changing my guess to pig, maybe feral pig. The big theory now is dog. Since the front of the face shows so much decay and since the water can do such crazy things to a body, it's hard to say what was going on in the top of the mouth. But man, those bottom canines look awfully big for a dog. A pig, however, has really big lower teeth. I'm going to throw in that it was a feral pig, just because 1) it makes more sense a wild pig would find its way to the ocean 2) feral pigs are trendy and there are way more of them than you think.

Where to See Animals in the Northeast

Here's a handy photo of a feral pig skull from Ft. Leonard Wood. Pig's big teeth are on bottom.











Here's a dog skull from the Royal Veterinary College. Dog's big teeth on top.








And here's a close-up of the monster's teeth--or what's left of them. Monster's big teeth on bottom.