A 23-foot-long dead humpback whale was found dead on Silver Strand State Beach in Coronado. The whale washed ashore at the beach on Tuesday morning at around 10 am, as per officials of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The one-year-old mammal, weighing over 2,000 pounds, was first spotted by the Coast Guard four days back about 9 miles offshore in Point Loma. The NOAA team reached the scene and inspected the dead whale. It’s a freshly dead whale, said the NOAA team.

Cause of the animal’s death is still not known, but the NOAA team is working with a host of equipment to know how it died. “We're looking to see if there's any kind of injuries that it could have. We will also take a look at the organs, see perhaps what it had been feeding on, test for bio-toxins”, said Kerri Danil, a biologist at the NOAA. They are looking for some unusual marks on the dead body to find the reason of death, as per the federal agency.

Once the task of examination and dissection is done, the team will remove the mammal from the beach, Danil said. The biologist also said that the team will conduct some tests on the whale's organs to observe what it had been eating, or if it had ingested any biotoxins. Every piece of information will be combined to know how the whale died, she added.

It is believed that the mammal separated from mother humpback whale while migrating from Mexico to Alaska. Stranding of a whale like humpback is definitely surprising, but it’s not unusual, said Danil. According to her, the NOAA team sees at least one stranding of humpback whale every year in San Diego.