If you're heading to Dewey Beach this holiday weekend, you may want to watch out for the 45-foot, 60,000-pound whale carcass.
A rare North Atlantic right whale died and was spotted Thursday in the waters between New Jersey and Delaware. It was then towed by the Coast Guard to the Delaware shore and eventually onto the beaches at Dewey.
Crews are currently cutting up the carcass and performing a a necropsy. Or, as Delmarvanow.com gently described it:
The backhoe methodically removed the creature's fins, setting them aside for testing and observation. Its baleen was completely gone and its tongue had burst during the decomposition process.
This quote doesn't make it sound any more appealing to look at:
"We weren't sure if it was a big, dirty boat or a whale," said (one) Rehoboth Beach resident. "But when I got closer to it, I saw it was a whale ... and I had to leave when the (backhoe) took its fin off."
And apparently the stench is worse than the sight of the bloody carcass, which one can get a whiff of more than a mile away.
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To sum things up, you may want to avoid gawking at the dead whale if you still want to have an appetite at your cookout.
Sadly, there are only about 300-350 right whales remaining in the world, according to the World Wildlife Fund, which calls it "one of the most endangered of all large whales, with a long history of human exploitation and no signs of recovery despite protection from whaling since the 1930s.
Oh, and if you're wondering why crews are disposing of the whale this way, it has been proven that dynamite is NOT a good option:
