Experts look for clues in dead whale’s body: ‘The smell is unlike anything else’
NORWAY, P.E.I. — Marine mammal experts carved up a 14-metre right whale Thursday on the red sandy shores of P.E.I. in the hopes of finding out what killed the endangered whale and at least five others this month.
It was not a pleasant task.
“Once the necropsy begins, it’s bad. The smell is unlike anything else. You can’t really compare it,” said Jarrett Corke of the Marine Animal Response Society.
Corke said the necropsy — an animal autopsy — started Thursday morning in Norway, a tiny hamlet near P.E.I.’s northwestern tip, after the Canadian Coast Guard and federal Fisheries officials beached the whale a day earlier.