Over the summer, residents in wealthy Palmetto Bay, south of Miami, spotted a strange large object stuck in the vast shallow grass flats of Biscayne Bay. When they kayaked out to investigate, things got even stranger.
What they found was a fleshy mass, at least 12 feet long, streaked in black and white, and decomposing. They suspected it was the head of a whale, and alerted conservationists at the nearby Deering Estate.
Ana Alexandra Rojas, conservation and research specialist there, headed out in a boat with a few co-workers to have a looksee. “You take anything that the public says with a grain of salt,” she said. “Maybe they were exaggerating.” But as she and her team approached the object, they realized the kayakers were right.
“It still had a lot of decomposing flesh on it at that point,” she said. “Oh, it was a disgusting smell. It just hits you really strongly. But I wasn’t disgusted as much as I was amazed.”
The head was so far gone they couldn’t tell what type of whale it was, or how it had gotten there.
In addition to the sheer shock of finding the remains of a massive open-ocean marine mammal on a shallow grass flat, they found something even more odd.
“We believe somebody had actually tried to move it — we saw a wrench on top of it, so that was weird.”
At the time, she says, the whale head was within the boundaries of Biscayne National Park, so they left it alone to let nature take its course.
Pondering the skull
A few months later, Deering Estate artist in residence John William Bailly got wind of the whale head and was intrigued. By the time he paddled out in his kayak, all that was left was the massive skull and some rancid strips of blubber bobbing on the surface.
“The skull has been pretty much picked clean,” he said. He suspects birds, small fish and sharks had scavenged what they could. “There’s tons of sharks around here,” he said.
To Bailly, the skull, with its outsized beak-like length, had an eerie gravitas. “It’s just sitting there. It’s unbelievable,” he said. “That something so beautiful and so massive can pass on — that’s why I’ve been drawing it.
“I had just been painting skulls from the Capuchin Crypt in Rome [where 18th century monks arranged the skulls of their predecessors], and the next skull that I’m doing is a whale in Biscayne Bay,” he said.
Bailly, who also teaches at Florida International University, said his work plays with contradictions and parallels between the Americas and Europe.
He’s made five whale skull sketches so far, and said the images will definitely end up in his art.
A mystery to Bailly was how the heavy skull had somehow traveled over several hundred yards of shallows. On one of his trips out to sketch the skull, he snorkeled around the area and found no other bones. “I saw nothing,” he said. “I don’t understand how a whale head appears without the rest of it.”
He also wondered about the life of the whale — what species was it, where had it traveled, why had it died?
The whale in question
The skull, it turns out, belonged to a sperm whale that had become stranded in the shallows of Mud Keys, a group of small islets bordering the Gulf of Mexico just north of Key West — nearly 100 miles from where the skull now rests.
When fisherman spotted the whale on the morning of May 10, it was stuck on its side and still alive, but looked emaciated. FWC officers arrived and found the animal helpless in the shallows, its blowhole underwater. “The animal drowned,” said Denise Boyd, an Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission marine mammal research associate who later led a necropsy on the whale. The officers were with it when it died. There was nothing they could do.
The whale was a mature male, 47 feet long, 40 tons, in the prime of its life. It was also the second sperm whale to die that week along the Keys — a newborn, separated from its mother, was spotted in the shallows near Key Largo being trialed by a tiger shark. It later beached itself and died, according to the Miami Herald.
Authorities towed the large sperm whale from Mud Keys to nearby Stock Island, where Boyd and her team laid it out on a tarp in the parking lot of Robbie’s Marina and performed the necropsy.
The carcass was so large researchers had to climb on top of it to do their work. What they found was disturbing.
When they cut the first of three stomachs open they discovered that it was stuff and nearly completely obstructed with a 2-foot-long tangled wad of debris that weighed 3 pounds.
They unraveled the knotted mess to find two pieces of commercial fishing net, one 7 feet long and the other 6 feet, 226 feet of commercial longline gear and plastic bag material. There was also a gaggle of parasitic worms that Boyd said were essentially harmless.
Boyd and her team believe that the wad likely interfered with the whale’s ability to digest food, causing it to weaken, wash ashore and drown.
The whale appeared emaciated, said Boyd, and liver analysis confirmed that it had started to break down its fat stores — something that would happen if the whale was starving.
How did the whale’s head end up 100 miles away in the grass flats of Biscayne National Park?
Disposing of a whale isn’t easy.
According to Biscayne National Park ranger Elizabeth Strom, the carcass was towed off shore into the Gulf Stream and set adrift.
Normally, as the carcass decomposes it fills with gasses and floats along, said Dr. Shane Gero, founder of the Dominica Sperm Whale Project. As sharks feed on it, they puncture it and it sinks.
Boyd said they tracked the carcass via a telemetry tag as the Gulf Stream carried it north along the Keys, and the track indicates that the skull in Biscayne Bay is probably from that whale that died out in Mud Keys. “It appears that the body and head separated at some point and the head wound up in the current position,” said Strom.
“I’ve never heard of a head dislocating from a floating whale like that,” said Gero. “It’s not easy to cut into the body of a whale, so to disarticulate a skull from the spine … maybe it was struck by a ship?”
An ostracized hunter
A whale of that size and age would have likely been outcast from his maternal pod, possibly joined a bachelor school for his teen years, and then moved on to hunt in solitude, closer to the poles. He would have battled prey such as giant squid and deep-water sharks. The biggest males can reach 60 feet in length, dive for up to an hour and reach depths of nearly two miles.
Boyd said there were scars from squid tentacles on the whale’s nose, and she found several dozen squid beaks in its stomachs. “Some of those beaks were enormous!” she said, indicating deep-water battles. The beaks could have been in the whale’s stomach for months, she said. The mammals don’t digest them, but rather regurgitate them or pass them whole.
According to NOAA, sperm whales are the largest toothed whale, more closely related to dolphins and orcas than baleen whales.
Like other sperm whales of the region, he probably would have been born in the tropics and traveled with a band of females and their young.
“Circumstantially, I would say this was a male that left his natal waters,” Gero said. “Sperm whales travel in matrilineal families of mothers and daughters, and eventually the males leave.”
“Prior to our work in Dominica, we thought that testosterone kicked in, and sexual conflict kicked in, and they got kicked, out, but it’s actually must sadder, or compassionate,” said Gero. “The male gets older, mom has a new baby, and all the females in the family start to ignore the older male. He gets socially ostracized. Sometimes he’ll follow his family around for two years or more at a distance before deciding, okay, there’s no reason for me to stick around, and he’ll leave.”
From there males form bachelor groups and move toward the colder poles, said Gero. Eventually they become solitary, and travel entire oceans, from the Azores to Norway, from the Bahamas to northern Canada, using echolocation to search for food and mates.
“Males come back to [the tropics] in their 30s and 40s to mate, when they get big, like this guy was,” said Gero. “From the genetics we know that the males must be switching oceans.”
They find females in heat by making a noise called a clang. “We think it functions like antlers in a deer where both females and potential male competitors can assess how valuable a male is. A big clang means a big valuable male. The female can then choose to go and find the male – these clangs travel as much as 40 km [24 miles].”
Gero also said that sperm whales have regional clans with different dialects and social calls. “The animals in Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico and the Azores all sound different, so you can record the males when they’re mating to try to figure out where they’re from.”
Leaving a tropical clan, traveling to arctic waters and back to tropics might have been the dead whale’s journey, but there’s no way to be certain about where he’d roamed.
Marine debris such as the commercial fishing gear in this whale’s stomach is one of the major threats to the species. In the deep dark water where they hunt, they can confuse a suspended chunk of plastic or netting for prey.
Biscayne National Park has a marine debris removal program, run by park staff and volunteers, which Strom said removed 68,932 pounds of debris from within park boundaries in fiscal year 2022.
The whaling industry of the 19th century, vividly portrayed in Herman Melville’s monumental novel Moby-Dick, coveted sperm whales for the waxy spermaceti inside their massive heads, which was used for oil lamps, lubricants and candles.
The substance helps the whales focus sounds as they echo-locate to find prey far below. Sperm whales range all over the world’s oceans, but are endangered.
Postscript
As Hurricane Ian collided with Florida, storm surge and tropical force winds buffeted Biscayne National Park. When Bailly returned to the skull for more sketching, he found that the storm had pushed it shallower. It now rests against a mangrove shoreline.
“It’s great for my sketches. I can see even more of it,” he said. “It reminds me of the skulls from the Capuchin Crypt in Rome, where the crypt says, ‘What you are now we used to be; what we are now you will be.'”
