DATE: Friday, October 10, 1997              TAG: 9710100653

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY PAUL CLANCY, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH                    LENGTH:   69 lines

MOTHER WHALE DIES, A SHOCK FOR TEAM SHE DID WELL AFTER HER TRIP TO BALTIMORE; MUSEUM STAFF DOESN'T KNOW WHAT KILLED HER.

The whale who flew to Baltimore will not see the wild ocean again.

The morning after her extraordinary trip to the National Aquarium in the belly of a Navy transport plane, the pygmy sperm whale took a sudden turn for the worse and died.

The night before, she was eating ``like a pig,'' as one member of the Virginia Marine Science Museum's stranding team put it, and swimming vigorously in her new habitat. Then, mysteriously, at 5:30 a.m. Wednesday, she plunged to the bottom of the pool.

Elaborate tests, including a sonogram, an endoscopy, blood tests and, after she died, a necropsy, failed to determine the illness that caused her to come ashore with her newborn baby two weeks ago at Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge.

It was the first live stranding of mother and baby marine mammals in the stranding team's 10-year history.

There were high hopes among the staff and many volunteers who tended the whales day and night at the stranding center pool, feeding them squid and vitamins, monitoring their respiratory rates and taking blood samples. But the male baby, only a few months old, died suddenly last Saturday.

The mother's vital signs plunged briefly; then she rebounded, and team members thought she might make it.

They accompanied her on her flight in the cargo hold of the transport plane, then helped introduce her to the far bigger pool at the National Aquarium.

``We were all so happy to see her in a tank she could move in,'' said museum Marketing Director Alice Scanlan, who works closely with the team.

The whale's death came as a shock and deep disappointment to stranding team members who had kept the mother alive for 10 days at the center's small pool in a warehouse off Birdneck Road. It was the longest such effort.

The museum's stranding team, which responds to calls about beached marine mammals and sea turtles up and down the Virginia coast, is one of the most active in the country.

Even though the success rate for saving and eventually releasing stranded dolphins and whales is poor, there's always the chance, team members say. ``As long as there's that chance, we'll take it,'' Scanlan said. ``It would be more heartbreaking to me not to try.''

With the success rate for stranded animals so low, some will ask why the team goes to such great lengths to save them, acknowledged Mark Swingle, the stranding team director. But he added:

``Their lives are still a bit of a mystery, and every time we have this special opportunity to get as close to these animals as we have, we learn a tremendous amount, sometimes about ourselves.''

Robbins Barstow, president emeritus of the Cetacean Society International, put it this way: ``Though it is a different life form, the life of a whale is still significant and one that appeals to the better nature of human beings to try to keep it alive.

``It's something that reaches the generous and compassionate part of our nature.''

Their deaths may be as mysterious as their lives.

Dr. Brent Whitaker, an aquatic-animal veterinarian at the aquarium, said pathology tests of the whale's organs may show the presence of an infectious disease. ``Then again, we may never know. In many cases we simply can't find the answer.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

STEVE EARLEY/The Virginian-Pilot

Wendy Walton, of the stranding team, worked with the whale at the

Virginia Marine Science Museum a few days after the stranded. KEYWORDS: BEACHED WHALE

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