The South America continent is filled with an amazingly diverse collection of plant and animal life. It is home to many plant species and mammal species. However, whales are not typical species who associate in jungles of South America.
According to a post by the Brazilian conservation group Bicho D’água, The carcass of an 8-meter (26-foot) humpback whale was found in the mangrove forests of northern Brazil.
There is a belief that the whale is about one-year-old, the whale baby was already eight meters (26 feet) from head to tail, according to an Instagram post from Bicho D’água. Adult humpback whales could grow to twice that size.
The team is curious and have no idea how the whale has reached the jungle.
“We believe this is a calf which may have been traveling with its mother and probably got lost or separated during the migratory cycle,” Renata Emin, a marine mammal expert with Bicho D’água, told the Brazilian news site O Liberal.
“We’re still not sure how it landed here, but we’re guessing that the creature was floating close to the shore and the tide, which has been pretty considerable over the past few days, picked it up and threw it inland, into the mangrove,” she said.
They have a vast range crossing across most of the world’s oceans, counting the opening to the Amazon basin, where this whale was found. They are known to travel tens of thousands of kilometers each year, feeding in polar seas before moving to warmer waters to breed and give birth.
However, the team has put effort to collect samples from the calf, so that they can identify the reason for whale’s death. As per the Newsweek, the autopsy would take 10 days. Apart from that, carcass also too big to move or carry, therefore, the researchers plan to ultimately remove its skeleton for study at the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, a natural history museum in the nearby city of Belém.
The causes of stranding are numerous. As sentinels of the marine environment, marine mammals have a great deal to tell us about the health of our oceans. Stranded animals carry that message to everyone.
I am a Business Management graduate from the University Of Staffordshire (UK) and a qualified personnel officer who completed the National Diploma of Training and Human Resource development at Institute of Personnel Management (Sri-Lanka).
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