When an Oregon Coast Beach Blob Revealed a Couple of Odd Scientific Twists

Published 09/15/25 at 6:25 p.m.
By Oregon Coast Beach Connection Staff

(Cannon Beach, Oregon) – Science can be one serious freak zone. Real science can be way stranger that science fiction – a lot weirder. (Photo Pilar French)

Case in point: find something lying around an Oregon coast beach and it may be puzzling, but you (and / or the experts) believe you're on the right track to figuring out what it is. Until you aren't. Then, on top of it, it leads you to an answer on another wacky question about what washes up here.

That happened in 2023, surprising those of us with Oregon Coast Beach Connection and a few others.

What began as a typical beach outing turned into something far more unusual for Portland resident Pilar French. While exploring Cannon Beach with her two dogs, French captured a series of striking photos - one of which she felt compelled to share with Oregon Coast Beach Connection.

Photo Seaside Aquarium: the sperm whale in its original spot in January

The image showed what appeared to be a massive jellyfish, its translucent form lying there, half tucked away in sand. But it was far bigger than most. Far bigger – like preternaturally huge.

“I touched it with my foot and it jiggled like jello,” French said.

Initially, it looked like a jellyfish to the Oregon Coast Beach Connection team as well, but we then forwarded the photo to Seaside Aquarium for confirmation. The response revealed a twist (that also had another grisly twist – a twist within a twist, you might say). The object was likely an internal organ from one of the dead whales that washed ashore earlier that year.

Photo Seaside Aquarium from 2023: the sperm whale in its new spot farther south, definitely decomposing

“Maybe part of its stomach,” said Tiffany Boothe of Seaside Aquarium at the time. “We have bones from the sperm whale washing ashore in Gearhart too. At one point what was left of the intestines from the baby gray whale were also found on Gearhart beach.”

In late January of 2023, four separate whale carcasses appeared along the Oregon coast within just a few weeks. Among them was a 40-foot sperm whale near the Peter Iredale shipwreck and a baby gray whale that washed up only a few hundred feet away days later. Though the timing sparked some wacky public debate, experts confirmed it was a coincidence. Fourth Whale Carcass on Oregon Coast in Two Weeks, This Time Cannon Beach, Video

All this then led to an answer to the question: just how long does it take for a buried whale to decompose?

Unlike past incidents where carcasses were buried, these four whales were left to the tides and scavengers. Later that year, bits of their remains began surfacing in unexpected places - prompting caution for beachgoers and pet owners.

Boothe noted that high tides and strong surf at the time had shifted the sperm whale’s location about half a mile south of the Iredale.

“It also continues to be a great food source for a variety of scavengers, most notably bald eagles,” Boothe said back in 2023.

So how long does it take for a whale to totally decompose? Boothe said approximately nine months.

She also included some before and after photographs of a whale on the south Washington coast about ten years ago to illustrate this (see at bottom of story).

Photo Pilar French

Meanwhile, French had turned out to be quite the beach whistleblower. Barely a month after alerting Oregon Coast Beach Connection to this blobby weirdo she found some odd grooves atop Cape Kiwanda. It seems this was a rare discovery: geologists in the region had not seen anything like that in Oregon before. It became a famous find at the time, causing a brief media frenzy. Rare Natural Feature Atop Kiwanda Floors Geologists

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