Friday, October 16, 2026
By Outer Banks Voice on April 10, 2025
Update: Jennette’s Pier reports that if the conditions allow, a team from Currituck County public works plans to pull the animal up higher on the beach berm so scientists can perform an external exam and necropsy today.
A dead whale washed up in the surf in Corolla on Wednesday, the eighth whale fatality on the Outer Banks since January of last year. The whale has been identified as a female juvenile humpback.
The OBX Marine Mammal Stranding Network responded to the beach across from the Outer Banks Wildlife Education Center about 11 a.m., with plans to measure and examine the whale if it washes ashore.
The stranding is the eighth whale death on the Outer Banks in little over a year. Within one week last March, two whales stranded in Nags Head: a pregnant dwarf sperm whale with her nearly full-term fetus and a juvenile male believed to be her offspring too young to survive on his own.
Since then, several species of whales, including humpback and minke, have washed up dead or dying on beaches from the Virginia state line to Hatteras Island.
Several whale species have been monitored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for an “unusual mortality event” involving migrating whales along the East Coast since 2016.
Humpbacks and minkes migrate south in the winter, where they breed and give birth, then head back toward New England for the spring and summer to feed, according to NOAA. The whales are swimming past the Mid-Atlantic this time of year, with many juveniles hanging around the area to feed.
Past findings by the OBX Marine Mammal Stranding Network show a variety of reasons for winter whale deaths in the area, including disease, parasites, fishing entanglement, ship strikes and weather events. Often, a cause is never identified.
