A young gray whale has been found dead after swimming 20 miles (32.2km) inland up a river in Washington state, a local scientific research group said, pointing to hunger as a possible cause.
"We are saddened to confirm that the whale seen in the Willapa River over the past few days is deceased," the Cascadia Research Collective said in an update on Facebook on Saturday.
It added the group was evaluating the safety of the locaction to carry out an examination.
The juvenile whale, affectionately dubbed "Willapa Willy" by locals, was first spotted last Wednesday in the north fork of the river, about 145 miles southwest of Seattle, the marine mammal research group said.
The whale, "although thin, was behaving normally," the group said at the time, with no sign of injuries.
Its teams had hoped the whale would find its own way out of the river but it failed to do so.
Gray whales undertake long spring time migrations north up the Pacific Coast to feed in the Arctic using up their nutritional reserves along the way, John Calambokidis, a research biologist with the Cascadia Research Collective, told the Associated Press. "When that happens, you often see gray whales in a more desperate search for new areas to feed," he added. "That's the most likely context for this whale."
Gray whales in the eastern part of the Pacific Ocean have faced reduced food availability in the northern Bering and Chukchi seas off Alaska's coast in recent years, Calambokidis said.
