A whale in New York Harbor. c/o Foxnews.com
NEW YORK — Marine biologists were standing watch on Tuesday over a young whale that lost its way in New York harbor and nearly wandered into a narrow waterway notorious for industrial pollution.
he animal, described as a juvenile minke whale about 15 feet long, was cruising around Gowanus Bay, the outlet from the mile-long Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn.
It appeared to be in good health and not distressed, said Kim Durham, rescue program director for the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation.
• Click here to visit FOXNews.com’s Natural Science Center.
The foundation, based in Riverhead, N.Y., specializes in cases involving whales, dolphins, seals and sea turtles.
Durham and other experts were dispatched to the scene after the whale was spotted early Tuesday.
[Locals
dubbed the animal “Sludgy,” after the notoriously grungy waters of the
Gowanus Canal, which a character in Jonathan Lethem’s novel “Motherless
Brooklyn” describes as being “the only body of water in the world
that’s 90 percent guns.”
A television news helicopter videotaped it leaping out of the water, a behavioral trait common to whales of the baleen species.
The
whale’s playground was in waters hemmed in by docks and a large oil
depot at the exit from the famously polluted canal, but Durham said she
was not unduly concerned that it would be affected in the short term by
anything in the water.
Durham said she
was glad to note that the whale was not swimming in tight circles or
exhibiting other behavior that might be indicative of disease.
She
said the whale would be monitored overnight, with the hope that it
might decide on its own to leave the area and swim out into the harbor,
where the water is deeper.
“My main
concern is not what it is doing but simply why it is here,” Durham said
in a telephone interview. “This is not really an environment conducive
to its good health.”
The U.S. Coast Guard and a police harbor patrol boat were standing by but didn’t plan to take action unless it was necessary.
Whales are a rare sight in New York harbor, and it was not immediately known when a previous sighting of a live whale last occurred.
A New York Aquarium official, Fran Hackett, theorized that the whale followed a school of fish into the Gowanus area.
“It’s just swimming around in there, and reasonably well,” she said in a telephone interview.
The Gowanus canal, named for a native American group that once lived in the area, runs about a mile from picturesque Boerum Hill in south Brooklyn to the bay in Red Hook, a quaintly rundown harbor community where grain ships once loaded cargo for Europe and shipyards turned out ferry boats and fancy yachts.
The
last reported incident involving a whale was the discovery in 2000 of a
dead whale floating in the harbor between Brooklyn and Staten Island,
apparently the victim of a collision with a ship.
In
1993, an ailing whale was recovered off the north shore of Long Island
Sound and was nursed back to health during eight months at the New York
Aquarium in Coney Island.