A charter boat was tracking a gray whale cruising close to the coast, at times 100 feet from shore passing the Balboa Pier on its northbound journey.
But something was different about the way this whale swam, and as the boat got closer, it became apparent the cause: The gray whale had no tail.
“It definitely had a unique swimming style because it had to compensate for not having a tail anymore,” Newport Coastal Adventure owner Ryan Lawler said of the whale spotted early Monday, March 13.
Instead of its flukes, the whale had to use its pectoral flippers – located toward the head of its body – leaning sideways to adjust its swimming.
It’s not the first time a whale without a tail has been documented. Alisa Schulman-Janiger, co-founder of the Gray Whale Census and Behavior Project, based in Palos Verdes Peninsula, remembered being shocked when she saw her first tailless whale in Mexico back in 1985. More recently, there’s been sightings in Southern California in 2015, 2016 and 2018, she said.
Schulman-Janiger has sent footage of the latest whale spotted to experts up in Northern California and in Baja, where gray whales have spent the last few months breeding and giving birth, but it’s too soon, she said, to tell if the whale matches any previous sightings.
The whale was moving at about 3 mph, Lawler said, slightly slower than the typical 4 mph the grays move at while migrating back to their Alaskan feeding grounds, passing Southern California on their journey.
“It was not giving any indication that it was distressed, it was making due,” Lawler said. “It was doing pretty good, all things considered.”
The whale was close to shore, but that’s common behavior for the whales, which like to play around in the shallows, sometimes using the sand to scratch their bodies.
“It was actually playing around in the waves,” he said. “But the injury is obviously dramatic. We think of…
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