The mature female humpback whale that washed ashore dead on Long Beach Island last week was well known to scientists, who have tracked her for thirty seven years. Kimberly Durham, rescue program director of the Riverhead Foundation, described her as a “celebrity in the whale world.” The humpback was nicknamed Istar, after the Babylonian goddess of fertility. Istar was one of the most productive female humpback whales in the Gulf of Maine population, giving birth to at least eleven known calves. Istar was reported to be at least 41 years old, 48 feet long and was estimated to weigh 30 to 35 tons. The investigation into the whale’s death is underway but the damage to her skull suggests that she was run down by a ship. Ship strikes are one of the greatest threats to endangered species of whales.
Humpback found dead on East Quogue beach was a celebrity whale
Istar, number 0080 in the North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catalog, was among the first 120 whales documented with a then-new technique that used distinctive markings on the whale’s tail fins, called flukes, in 1977.
“It was an animal we’ve known,” said Rosemary Seton, research associate with the marine mammal laboratory Allied Whale at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, which maintains the whale catalog. “It was one of our pioneering humpbacks.”
Istar had no electronic tracking device. But her annual migration from her feeding grounds in the Gulf of Maine, where she would spend April through December, to her wintering grounds in the Caribbean were tracked by scientists and whale enthusiasts through the markings on her flukes.
She was likely returning to the Gulf of Maine when she died, Robbins said.
Istar was the mother of Cloud, born in 1977, the first humpback whale that has been tracked since birth by the Allied Whale lab. She was also the mother of Scylla, another female who also has had 11 calves.
Video footage of Istar.