Environment Report: The Whales San Diego Buried In Trash

By MacKenzie Elmer, the Voice of San Diego

March 5, 2024

Thirty-six.

That’s how many dead whales the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration documented along San Diego County shores between 2014 and 2023. Eight of those made their grave in a landfill.

To scientists studying the health of deep ocean environments, a dead whale doesn’t belong in the trash. Sinking whale bodies sprout and feed instant ecosystems, called “whale falls,” when their carcasses reach the abyssal, lightless sea bottom.

“Only a tiny percent of the sea floor’s been observed directly and sampled,” said Craig Smith, an oceanographer who published the first research on whale falls. “Every time we take a sample … we bring up a hundred species that are new to science.”

So, trapping that juicy, life-giving meat buffet under the layers of garbage and air-trapping plastic of a landfill seems like, well, a waste.

For beached whales, their fate depends on the jurisdiction that manages the shoreline. California State Parks works with the West Coast Marine Mammal Stranding Network to determine how to remove and dispose of stranded marine mammals, according to Jorge Moreno, a spokesman for state parks’ southern district. If “disposal is necessary,” a hauling contractor makes the landfill selection. Miramar Landfill, owned by the city of San Diego, was the landfill of choice for whale strandings in 2011, 2013, 2015, 2016 and 2018, according to news reports.

I did some math. Based on the combined reported length of each whale, and the average size of each species, the eight landfilled whales likely weighed 200 tons combined. That’s as much garbage as 200 Californians generate in one year. For San Diego, a city that already missed its goal of diverting 75 percent of its waste from the dump by 2020, burying whales in the landfill is a big swing and a miss.

Still, when such a massive amount of meat washes ashore and begins to rot, there are only a few options available to do away with a whale carcass.

They’ve been buried in the sand where they lie, like the gray whale that began to decompose near Hotel del Coronado last September. According to NOAA’s data, it’s one of the more popular options in San Diego County. But it can take months for the body to decompose fully and become a nuisance and a hazard to the public.

One might elect to blast the body with dynamite, like the famous exploding whale on the coast of Oregon in 1970 filmed by local TV news crews hit by flying bits of blubber. As far as I can tell, San Diego hasn’t blown up a whale since as far back as my data goes.

Another popular option is towing the whale back out to sea, like the Dec. 10 fin whale who likely beached after being chased by killer whales. It was not an easy task. City lifeguards tried to tow the body, conservatively, weighing 100,000 pounds, out to sea but the freshly-dead whale dropped just a mile offshore. Gasses built up in her body cavity as she began to decompose, causing her to float back to the surface and drift toward Bird Rock in La Jolla. Lifeguards towed the body out again, this time a full 20 nautical miles where she drifted between the Channel Islands and Baja California for weeks.

Or, as I noted, the whale carcasses can be chopped up and buried in a landfill.

The last time that happened was May of 2021 when a baby fin whale collided with a boat off Catalina Island. In 2018, a landfill took a decomposing gray whale off La Jolla. Between 2014 and 2016, six more whale bodies were sent to landfills, most of them smaller and younger whales. They’ve been found floating at the Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Plant, off an aircraft carrier in San Diego Bay, Black’s Beach, Del Mar, Silver Strand and Torrey Pines beaches.

While returning dead whales to the ocean is the best thing to do ecologically speaking, Smith isn’t too concerned about the landfilling of whales since few of those that die end up on beaches.

“It’s better for marine ecosystems to recycle them,” he said. “But it’s probably not that big of a deal for the whale fall communities if a few of them get put in landfills.”

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