Earlier in March, almost 200 pilot whales and a couple handfuls of dolphins stranded on a sandbar in Tasmania. In January, 48 sperm whales stranded on a different Tasmanian sandbar. Another 150 pilot whales stranded in November. Of those 400 odd animals, only 54 pilot whales and 5 dolphins survived. Now, another massive stranding has occurred, with over 80 long finned pilot whales and some dolphins on the beaches near Margaret River in Perth, Australia.
The most current estimates are that only 17 are still alive, and about 100 staff and volunteers are working furiously to save the few remaining whales. Another 10 whales are seen just offshore, and experts are concerned that they may share the same fate. No one knows yet what caused this mass stranding. Rough seas are making releases difficult at the moment but The Department of Environment and Conservation hopes the whales can be returned to the water tonight.
DEC spokesman Gred Mair said that the plan is to group the animals in Hamelin Bay until they can be transported by truck to Flinders Bay for release. By moving the animals before release, the DEC hopes to prevent the animals from re-stranding. However, there are risks involved with taking any marine animal out of the water, even for short periods of time. But the DEC is confident that this strategy is the safest way to ensure the most animals survive.
The cause of these massive strandings, now occurring at an alarming rate, is still unknown. Scientists are collecting samples from the dead to try to determine a cause.
You can see more heartbreaking photos at the PerthNow Photo Gallery.
Thats horrible. Was it climate change related?
IIRC, mass strandings have been linked to military sonar. I wonder if there are any exercises going on in the area.
I don’t know if Climate Change has in any way caused strandings like this one. The only loose connection I can think of is that our CO2 output is making the ocean more acidic and thus noisier, which could (possibly?) stress out marine mammals enough to cause them to strand or mess with their ability to navigate via sonar – but I haven’t seen anything conclusive connecting global climate change and marine mammal strandings.
Cath: I’d presume that if it were going on, the media would have pounced on it (or will shortly). It is a favorite thing to blame – so I’d guess if there’s even a small amount of naval activity that could be to blame, we’ll hear about it soon. I guess it depends on what the scientists find from the dead bodies – if there’s any internal hemorrhaging, or anything else to suggest sonar-related stranding.
While there is a long history of pilot whale strandings in this area dating back prior to pre-industrial times, the fact that this was a multiple species stranding raises the possibility that this was caused by some regional trauma, and not some behavioral anomaly of the pilot whales. If there was no record of unusual geo-seismic activity which may have caused this multi-species event, human agency can not be ruled out.
There was a joint international naval exercise occurring around that time in the area called “Gobra Gold 2009” as well as some seismic surveys performed by the Lamont Doerty Earth Observatory. Further inquiry might examine if there is any closer spaciotemporal correlations which might be drawn to these events.