What appears to be the carcass of a Bryde’s whale has washed ashore in Case Inlet in Puget Sound in Washington State.   If it is a Bryde’s whale, it is a mystery what a whale that favors tropical waters was doing in the frigid waters of the Pacific Northwest.

Cetaceous stranger washes up in Puget Sound

But is it indeed a Bryde’s whale?  Normally, as in the case of a gray whale that washed up last year, biologists know what it is long before they investigate the carcass. The problem with a Bryde’s whale is it looks like so many others, making it one of most mysterious of all whales.   ”And I think a lot of it is misidentification, they look a lot like a sei whale, a fin whale,” said Dufour.

If biologists can confirm this is Bryde’s, only then can they dig into the deeper question of what it’s doing here.