"As conservation efforts make the waters in the New York region more inviting for whales, increasing traffic from ships and boats has contributed to a climbing number of strandings."
"Just before noon on a Sunday in October, passengers settled onto the upper deck of the American Princess, a 95-foot cruising vessel that departed from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, into the Atlantic Ocean in search of whales.
They did not have to wait long to find one. After rounding Breezy Point, Queens, the captain cut the engine and the sightseers rushed to the port side as the glassy-gray ridge of a humpback’s dorsal fin broke the surface of the waves.
The crew had encountered the 29-foot, 12,700-pound female three days earlier and saw more than a dozen shallow scars running along her back.
Two weeks later, the same whale washed up on a sandbar off Long Beach Island, N.J., and died the next day. Officials with the Marine Mammal Stranding Center, an animal rescue service based in New Jersey, determined that a ship’s propeller had wounded her in August. A necropsy found that she was severely underweight and had signs of kidney disease, the facility said."
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