Oregon Marine Mammal Stranding Network

On this edition of Oregon On The Record, Tiffany Boothe, an assistant director of the Seaside aquarium, and Jim Rice, a member of Oregon State University's Marine Mammal Institute, weigh in on the life and death of whales along Oregon’s shores.

It's the heart of harbor seal pupping season. Jim Rice, the stranding program manager for Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, said seal pups may come ashore and seem stranded, but they’re just waiting for their mom to retrieve them.

[Jim] Rice did a necropsy on the beach and was in the middle of that when word came of the two whales farther up the coast.

The skeleton of a rare 70-foot blue whale that washed up on the Oregon coast several years ago will journey to Alberta, Canada, later this week so a team of preservation and restoration specialists can prepare it for public display at Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport. 

A sperm whale carcass washed up on a northern Oregon beach this week. Jim Rice, stranding program manager, said, "We document an average of six large whale strandings annually in Oregon. In the vast majority of cases, the animal is dead before it comes ashore."

More than 150 sea lions have been found sick or dead along Oregon’s coast due to a bacterial outbreak of Leptospirosis this summer. Jim Rice is the stranding program manager for Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute. He joins Think Out Loud to share what the outbreak has looked like so far and how it compares to previous years.

Jim Rice, a stranding program manager, replied and said it simply appears to be the decomposed remains of a dead whale. “What looks like hair is the decomposing remains of other body tissues: muscle, nerves, tendons etc. I would estimate that this one has been dead for several months,” he said.