Another man with a stick poked at the whale's entrails, which were oozing from its mouth. Humans strange too Park Service Ranger Pat Norton noted that beached whales usually cause humans to act strangely. He recalled that when the last whale washed onto Stinson Beach in 1987, one man emerged from the crowd, kissed the beast on its blowhole, and ran away. And then there is the stench. Whale biologist Jon Stern, a graduate student working at the Romberg Tiburon Center for Environmental Studies, said whales are malodorous dead or alive.
Whale breath smells like overcooked broccoli.
It took us a while to nail that one down. Stern and Raymond Bandar, a field associate with the California Academy of Sciences, took samples of blubber and barnacles on Monday. The fluke's uniquely serrated edge and scar patterns can help identify the individual animal, Chandler said. His group knows about 600 humpbacks individually - maybe three quarters of the total that feed off the North American coast, he said. Originally, the Park Service had planned to bury the whale deep in the dunes above the beach, where it wouldn't be uncovered by winter storms.