Unalaska, AK – A forty foot long dead humpback whale currently can be seen--and smelled--just off the back side of Little South America on Amaknak Island, where it was towed from the other side of Unalaska Bay Sunday evening.

"It's a full-sized female, so it's about as big as they get," said marine biologist Reid Brewer, with the local University of Alaska Fairbanks extension office. "From the waterline it doesn't look very large, but it's kind of like an iceberg--if you see one of these things floating, only about a third of it is above water and the other two-thirds is below."

Brian Rankin spotted the dead whale Sunday afternoon in Broad Bay, and Brewer and Don Graves towed the animal tail-first behind Graves's boat across Unalaska Bay to Little South America, where it's now anchored to the beach and floating just offshore.

Brewer said he hoped to get some sort of educational value out of the dead animal, rather than to just let sleeping whales lie.

"The idea was to bring it back to town so people could appreciate the grandeur of an amazing sea animal like this, but also so that we can let the whale live on by examining why it may have died," he said.

Brewer said that hopefully a specialist from the Alaska Sea Life Center in Seward will come out here in the next few days to perform a necropsy on the whale, which weighs somewhere between 35 and 40 tons. Brewer said it was probably dead for a couple of days before Rankin found it, and there aren't any signs of human involvement in its death.

This is the first time a whale of this size has washed up off of Unalaska in more than a decade, although there have been seven smaller marine mammal strandings here in the last several years. Humpback whales tend to follow the krill that they eat into Unalaska Bay during the summer months, when as many as a hundred of them have been spotted in the area between Hog Island and Broad Bay.