Liberia: Experts Warn of Health Risk as Hungry People Eat a Dead Whale - FrontPageAfrica

Summary

• A dead whale washed ashore at Sheri Beach, in Monrovia, tangled in a fishing net. By the time authorities arrived, only bones remained — exposing gaps in Liberia’s coastal response system.
• Scientists suspect “ghost fishing”, abandoned nets that trap and starve marine life, caused the whale’s death. They say such deaths are often tied to pollution and unsafe fishing practices.
• Experts warn that eating stranded marine animals can be dangerous and say the incident underscores the need for stronger public awareness and clearer coastal reporting systems.

By Nemenlah Cyrus Harmon, environment correspondent with New Narratives 

CONGO TOWN, Monrovia-The morning of February 11 started like most mornings at here at Sheri Beach on the shoreline of the capital – the slow crash of Atlantic waves, the smell of salt and diesel. Then someone spotted something enormous at the water’s edge: A baby whale -still larger than most things that wash up on a Liberian beach – grey and motionless, a fishing net tangled tight around its head.

Within hours, locals said, over a thousand people had gathered. They came with knives, bags, and cutlasses to take chunks of the whale’s flesh away to eat. By the time government officials arrived the next morning, only the skeleton remained.

“All of a sudden, people started cutting pieces of it, and we couldn’t control it. Before we knew it, the whole place was crowded and skinned the whole thing to skeleton,” said Reak T. Cummings, caretaker of the beach and one of the first people on the scene.

Experts said the death of the whale at Sheri Beach exposed serious weaknesses in Liberia’s coastal protection system. Weak enforcement of fishing safety standards is leading to abandoned fishing gear that kills sea life.  And poor communication and a slow official response that is risking the health of citizens.

Liberia is a signatory to major international environmental agreements committing it to protect marine life, including the Convention on International Trade in Endanger Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.  Under the convention whales are afforded strict protection. Experts warn the death of the whale on the beach highlights systemic failures that leave both fragile ocean ecosystems and coastal communities at risk each time the sea delivers an unexpected danger.

Cummings said he had seen plenty of small fish wash up in the past –  cassava fish, and other fishes – things people quietly took home for dinner. But he had never seen anything like this.

“At first, we were trying to hold it up but it was so heavy that we couldn’t,” Cummings said.

Cummings said there was a fishing net wrapped around its mouth. The whale was already dead when it came ashore and had already begun to decompose suggesting it had been dead for some time. Cummings and a few others stood around the animal, unsure what to do. They had no number to call. They had no training for this moment.

Word had spread quickly through Congo Town. Hungry people arrived with tools like they were coming to work and quickly stripped to the whale to the bone.

Cummings said he didn’t eat any of it. Not because he knew it was dangerous, but because, he said plainly, “at first, we were afraid of it.” His concern that day was the children wading into the water near the carcass as waves pushed people around it. Not a single security officer was on the beach.

Late Arrival Of Officials At The Beach

The National Fisheries and Aquaculture Authority of Liberia, the government agency responsible for managing, regulating, and developing Liberia’s fisheries and aquaculture sector, only learned about the dead whale through a social media viral video.

The video triggered the agency’s response, “we initiated the investigation immediately,” said Sheck A. Sharif, director for environment and climate change at the Authority. But by the time the Authority’s team arrived the next morning, only bones were left. They photographed the skeleton.

Cummings produced the net he had saved from the scene — a small-scale artisanal multifilament net, the kind used by everyday fishermen, with small float attachments and rocks to weigh it down, between four and five feet long. He said It had been wrapped around the whale’s entire head.

Sherif was careful with his conclusions. With no corpse he could not identify the species. He could not confirm how long the whale had been dead before it came ashore or how long the net had been around its head. But he said the net had likely stopped the whale from eating. He said it was a warning to fisherfolk to bring all nets back to shore.

“For every time you leave a net at sea, there’s a tendency for it to ghost fish,” Sharif said. “It’s just in the water. Anything in its way, it catches.”

Experts warn West Africa’s “marine species are in danger,” from a range of threats including pollution.  

“When the water body is polluted, they have to come out in order to gain good air to breathe,” said Joe Blamah Jallah, a lecturer of environmental science at the University of Liberia and the African Methodist Episcopal University. “So in most cases, when they come out, they get trapped by human beings.”

Jallah said when he learned about the whale story, he was frustrated, but not surprised. He said when marine species wash ashore, there are usually a few causes: low oxygen in the water, pollution from oil spills, sickness, or entanglement. Each of these is either worsened or directly caused by human activity. And each time a whale or large marine animal dies at the edge of the sea, it is a signal a message from the ocean that something in the ecosystem is wrong.

When the whale washed ashore at Sheri Beach, hundreds of people descended on the carcass and cut it up to take home for food. Jallah said the response did not necessarily only reflect poverty, but it also showed a lack of public education about marine conservation. He called for sustained awareness campaigns targeting coastal communities to help residents understand the importance of protecting marine species.

“Liberia is far better off than a lot of countries that protect their conservation,” he said. “For us, it’s lack of education. Because what the men don’t know, they don’t know.”

Jallah warned that eating a dead marine animal, especially one that has been in the water for an unknown length of time, carries real health risks. Bacteria, and possible viruses, can survive cooking. He pointed to Ebola as a reminder of what happens when people consume animals carrying unknown pathogens.

“Some of these people that ate the marine species need to be tested to know,” Jallah said. “Because the first thing we need to establish is what brought the marine species from deep sea to come closer to the coastline.”

All three men, the caretaker, the government official, and the expert, agree on one thing: the most critical failure on February 11 was not the people with the knives. It was the silence before they arrived.

Cummings didn’t have the authority’s contact number. The authority didn’t have a representative on the beach. By the time the video went viral on Facebook and investigators from the agency were tagged, a thousand of people had already decided what to do with the whale.

“If we were in the know that we were supposed to call them, we were going to call them before anybody touched it,” Cummings said quietly. “But we were not aware.”

He ended with a simple request: that the authority and the government go to the communities that live along the coast and teach people what to do, not after the next whale dies, but before.

Sherif said his department is working on exactly that. The Authority plans to reach out to beach caretakers, fishing communities, and beachfront businesses across Montserrado County.

This story was a collaboration with New Narratives as part of the Investigating Liberia Project. Funding was provided by the Swedish Embassy in Liberia. The funder had no say in the story’s content.