On Thursday (Apr 6), conservation officials announced that Indonesian animal experts would conduct an autopsy on an 18-meter whale that washed up on a beach in Bali.
On Wednesday, the sperm whale, which people believed to weigh many tonnes, beached itself in the east of the holiday island in Bali.
Locals and officials pushed it back out to sea, but it became stranded again just hours later on a different beach. According to local marine and fisheries official Permana Yudiarso, it died on the shore with no visible wounds.
“We are still investigating the cause of death. We want to get a scientific explanation of whether it was because of pollution or plastic,” he said.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists sperm whales, which are the world’s largest predators, as “vulnerable” to extinction.
Vets and forensic experts have arrived at the scene to investigate the cause of the whale’s death, and its carcass will be buried in the coming days.
“Today we will conduct a necropsy test, and after that we will get an excavator to try to bury the carcass nearby,” Yudiarso said.
Police cordoned off the beach in Bali’s Klungkung regency to stop the theft of the whale’s meat or body parts.
Yudiarso said whales usually come closer to the shore when they are sick or dying.
In 2018, people found a dead sperm whale in Indonesia, which had more than 100 plastic cups and 25 plastic bags in its stomach. This discovery raised concerns about the massive marine rubbish problem in the Southeast Asian archipelago.
Indonesia is the world’s second-biggest contributor to marine debris after China.
