3rd dead blue whale floats off the coast

Another dead blue whale was floating toward shore Thursday in the Santa Barbara Channel, as puzzled experts try to determine why at least three of the huge mammals have died off the Southern California coast in less than two weeks.

Tracked by government aircraft, the 60-foot blue whale -- a member of the largest species on Earth -- was drifting toward the Ventura County coast and was expected to wash ashore sometime today.

Scientists said they didn’t know where it would land. Last week, a dead blue whale beached about 10 miles up the coast from Ventura and another was found in Long Beach Harbor before being towed out to sea.

Joe Cordaro, a wildlife biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service, said he couldn’t recall a similar spate of blue whale deaths off California or anywhere else.

“There’s something a little different going on right now,” he said, “and we don’t know what it is.”

The latest blue whale was spotted Wednesday afternoon by Derek Lee, a vacationing marine biologist who was sailing to Channel Islands Harbor in Oxnard after a few days off Santa Cruz Island.

“We got 50 feet away from it, took pictures and rounded it twice,” said Lee, who works in Northern California’s Farallon National Wildlife Refuge. “It was floating belly up, freshly dead and intact.”

Lee phoned Cordaro, who alerted scientists in the region’s Marine Mammal Stranding Network, a group of experts from marine institutes, government agencies and the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.

After the whale beaches today, biologists will begin the elaborate process of determining a cause of death.

The whale that washed ashore last week had numerous broken bones, suggesting it was hit by a ship in one of the Santa Barbara Channel’s busy shipping lanes. Some scientists also presumed that the one found earlier in Long Beach was inadvertently dragged to the harbor on the hull of a tanker. Authorities theorize it might have been the whale spotted off San Clemente Island after the Coast Guard released the carcass in the ocean.

Whether the animals were disoriented or slowed by illness is an open question. A bacterial product called domoic acid has been implicated in the stranding or deaths of more than 21 whales and dolphins since April, said Easter Moorman, a spokeswoman for the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. But tissues taken from the whales last week may have been too decomposed to yield answers, researchers said.

Scientists are also expected to scrutinize the whale for any sign of sonar damage, such as blood in its ear canal, because certain kinds of sonar have been linked to whale deaths elsewhere. On Aug. 31, a judge overruled environmental groups and allowed the Navy’s sonar training exercises to proceed off of Southern California.

No sign of sonar damage was found in the whale that beached last week, scientists said. The controversial training exercises started Sept. 11 off San Diego, about 150 miles south of the Santa Barbara Channel.

“Right now we have no evidence relating the whale deaths to the naval activities,” said Cordaro, of the National Marine Fisheries Service.

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steve.chawkins@latimes.com