Shocking moment giant 50ft sperm whale is found on Brit holiday beach – before LORRY needed to tow 35-tonne beast away
The enormous marine mammal had apparently suffered a fatal strike to the head by a passing vessel in tourist hotspot Tenerife, Spain.
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A Brit expat spotted the gargantuan whale washed up on the beach outside his apartment yesterday morning.
The 51-year-old said he walked to the front window 'with his coffee in hand and was stumped to see a whale on the small beach below my apartment'.
He added: 'It's not every day you find a whale washed up on your doorstep.'
Shocking footage shows the massive creature - which are often between 15 to 18 metres long - laying on the beach.
Confused locals are seen approaching the mammal before touching its tail.
The sperm whale was already dead by the time its massive carcass was swept ashore.
Authorities scrambled quickly to the scene to take samples of the marine mammal.
The enormous corpse was lifted off the beach by a lorry due to its size, before being taken away for incineration.
It was the fourth whale to wash ashore in the Canary Islands this month alone.
A whale was swept ashore in the tourist town of Playa de las Américas last Friday.
Abandoned theme park left 'frozen in time' where stranded Orca whales and bottlenose dolphins have been left to rot
Two others appeared dead on the coast of Gran Canaria earlier this month.
Over 30 marine mammal species live in Canarian waters, including dolphins, pilot whales, and sperm whales.
The Canary Islands record an average of 50 to 60 marine creature strandings each year, caused by disease, pollution, collisions, or acoustic disorientation.
Scientists have possibly identified the first species other than humans to use unique sounds as building blocks for complex communication.
Considered to be highly social animals, whales are known to communicate with each other by producing different combinations of clicks.
Researchers recently compared the phenomena — observed in sperm whales in the Caribbean — to how people use a set number of sounds (represented by letters) to compose words into an endless combination of sentences.
"Sperm whale vocalizations are more expressive and structured than previously believed," lead researcher Pratyusha Sharma of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wrote in the paper.
"Our findings open up the possibility that sperm whale communication might provide our first example of that phenomenon in another species," they said.
The discovery emerged thanks to an analysis of sperm whale vocalizations from about 60 animals that were recorded between 2005 and 2018.
Researchers examined the whales' sounds to look for similarities and patterns and ultimately found several repeated, 2-second-long 'codas' — the basic units of speech.
They found thousands of instances of unique sets of codas, or what could be considered words in human communication.
Scientists noted that the sets of sounds used by the sperm whales in the study varied by context.
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