A 28-foot dead whale carcass washed up on the oceanfront beach of eastern Fire Island on Monday night and a second dead whale was recovered in the Hamptons on Tuesday, officials said.
Suffolk County police Marine Bureau officers and Fire Island National Seashore rangers responded to the scene of a dead humpback whale on the beach in Ocean Ridge, the easternmost section of Davis Park, at 8:30 p.m., police and experts said.
Officers notified New York State Department of Environmental Conservation officers and the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation, who determined that the whale was a juvenile but found no signs of external trauma.
The foundation’s marine biologists will perform a necropsy to determine the whale’s cause of death, which was not immediately clear. The foundation will also bury the whale, police said.
A True’s beaked whale was also recovered Tuesday from a beach in Westhampton and brought back to the Riverhead Foundation’s facility, where it will undergo a necropsy, the group said.
The incidents came eight weeks after a humpback whale carcass washed up near the Wilderness Visitors Center west of Smith Point County Park on FI.
