PURDY — A gray whale that appeared to be trapped for a time Wednesday in the shallow water of Burley Lagoon in south Puget Sound made its way into deeper water, but it’s probably still in trouble, a whale expert said.
“This is, at best, a straggler of the migration along the Pacific Coast,” said John Calambokidis of Cascadia Research in Olympia.
“Most of the healthy animals have migrated past or else are feeding on the outer coast. The whales we see in Puget Sound in June and July are usually in poor condition,” he told the Kitsap Sun.
“In some of the photos that I saw, the whale looked pretty emaciated,” the biologist said, adding that a large patch of whale lice behind its blow hole might be covering some kind of injury. Whale lice are shrimplike creatures that feed on skin lesions.
