Over the weekend, residents and visitors in Hilton Head, S.C., witnessed something you don’t see very often: a beached whale. The 30-foot sperm whale, a young male, washed ashore, still alive, on Saturday, and residents were understandably upset. I witnessed some of this on Facebook over the weekend myself. People from as far away as Texas wanted to help and were trying to come up with ways to get the whale back into the ocean.
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The South Carolina Department of Natural Resources is assisting after a whale washed ashore on Hilton Head Island.
: https://t.co/Da1dfrQaft
: Shore Beach Service pic.twitter.com/NtXpJ9O6Ve
— WJCL News (@WJCLNews) May 4, 2025
While their hearts were in the right place, that was not the best idea.
The whale was very sick, and experts determined that euthanizing him was the most humane response to this rare sight. According to the Fish and Wildlife Foundation of Florida, the majority of whales that beach themselves likely do so because they’re sick or injured.
From the Town of Hilton Head Island Government:
A beached sperm whale has been spotted on Hilton Head Island.
The whale is still alive, and trained professionals, including NOAA and marine mammal experts, are on-site doing everything possible to keep it comfortable.
When… pic.twitter.com/HFYJGsRd75
— Holly Kesler (@hmkesler) May 4, 2025
This one was severely emaciated and an initial necropsy didn’t offer the team of experts working on him any clue as to what happened. He had food in his stomach. There was no plastic debris in his body, and he had no visible signs of physical trauma. So, veterinarians had to dig a little deeper. They took blood and tissue samples and will return to their labs to run diagnostic tests. With any luck, what they find will help prevent this from happening in the future.
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As the Town of Hilton Head Island Government posted on Facebook, “Its story is not ending in vain. A necropsy will be performed to help scientists learn from this loss and better understand the challenges marine mammals face. The whale will be respectfully buried following that process.”
You can probably imagine that euthanizing an animal of that size requires specialized equipment, which was brought in from the University of Florida. In the meantime, local experts kept the whale as comfortable as possible with towels and buckets of water. Once the veterinary team from the University of Florida arrived, the whale was sedated and euthanized, much like what happens when we choose to let our suffering pets go.
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According to NOAA marine mammal biologist Clay George, what makes this event especially unusual is that “The location where the whale came ashore was very far away from a sperm whale’s natural habitat.” He estimated that these whales typically live about 75 miles offshore and told Bluffton Today that “Sperm whales are also an endangered species, and our goal is to find out, if possible, if the cause of death was bad health or possibly human related.” He said that the team would use a track hoe to bury the whale near where it was beached.
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The local government also thanked NOAA, Sea Turtle Patrol Hilton Head Island, the Lowcountry Marine Mammal Network, the Georgia Aquarium veterinary program, and the town’s beach operations manager, Mike DeMaria, and his team for coming together to handle the situation. Bluffton Today reports that it’s the fifth whale to strand itself on the South Carolina coast since 2022.
As an animal lover and as a person who gets kind of disillusioned with how terribly we treat each other these days, I have to admit that this story warmed my heart. It was nice to see people come together with ideas and work as a team to ensure this whale had the best possible end to his short life. Maybe there’s a little hope for humanity after all?
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