125 pilot whales die on NZ beaches, 43 saved

Some 125 pilot whales died in New Zealand after stranding on the beach over the weekend — but vacationers and conservation workers Sunday managed to coax 43 others back out to sea.

Rescuers monitored the survivors as they swam away from Colville Beach on North Island's Coromandel peninsula, and by Monday morning they were reported well out to sea.

Department of Conservation workers and hundreds of volunteers helped re-float the 43 whales at high tide. The volunteers covered the stranded mammals in sheets and kept them wet through the day.

"Some 63 pilot whales stranded ... but it looks pretty good, we've got 43 live ones," Department of Conservation ranger Steve Bolten said as the pod swam out to sea.

Bolten said one of the whales may have been sick, or their sonar may have led them into the shallow harbor and they couldn't find their way out again.

Meanwhile on South Island, 105 long-finned pilot whales that stranded died Saturday, conservation officials said Monday.

Golden Bay biodiversity program manager Hans Stoffregen said they were discovered by a tourist plane pilot and only 30 were alive when conservation workers arrived.

"They were in bad shape. By the time we got there two-thirds of them had already died. We had to euthanize the rest," he said.

The whales had been out of the water for a long time.

"It has been quite hot and they were very distressed. You could see the pain and suffering in their eyes," he was quoted telling the Southland Times newspaper

Because the site is part of a nature reserve, the 105 whale carcasses were left to decompose where they stranded, Stoffregen said.

Large numbers of whales become stranded on New Zealand's beaches each summer as they pass by on their way to breeding grounds from Antarctic waters. Scientists so far have been unable to explain why whales become stranded.

Surf’s up, let’s save the whales

Federal fishery officers from Digby and Yarmouth counties moved some stranded pilot whales off a couple of beaches Tuesday, although more than one of the whales returned to the cobbled shore after being rescued.

On Tuesday morning, a lone pilot whale was reported stranded on Port Maitland Beach in Yarmouth County.

The whale was lying on its side but appeared to be in decent shape, said fishery officer Howard Blinn from the Meteghan office.

Officers were in touch with marine mammal rescue experts at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography.

They rolled the whale onto a tarp so the animal was on its belly.

"Apparently they get disoriented if they're on their side," said Mr. Blinn.

Eight officers got the whale turned around.

"The tide was coming up. There was quite a bit of surf. Finally it kind of swam away," said Mr. Blinn.

"It might be injured. We don't know," he said.

But later in the day, reports came in that more whales had landed at Bartletts Beach, about five kilometres away, on the Digby County line.

Officers said there were at least four whales, including one smaller one weighing maybe 360 kilograms or less.

One whale died.

The largest in the group was about four metres long and weighed an estimated tonne.

As rescuers were keeping the large whale in an upright position to aid its breathing, a smaller whale was spotted splashing in the surf, making its way back toward shore.

Two officers in wetsuits waded out to turn it around and push it back to sea.

That whale didn't go far and was seen swimming up and down the beach not more than 50 metres offshore.

Nine whales beached in Italy in rare accident

A pod of sperm whales was beached on Italy's southern coast and at least five died in what experts said was a rare mass beaching for such a large species

Nine whales measuring up to 40 feet in length were stranded Thursday on a beach in Puglia, the heel of boot-shaped Italy.
Only two managed to swim back to deeper waters and at least five were dead by Saturday, said Nicola Zizzo, one of the veterinarians caring for the animals. He said officials were considering euthanising the last two whales still trapped in high waves just off the beach.
The rough seas were making it difficult to understand even how many whales were still alive, with other experts telling Italian media that only one was breathing.
The sperm whale is the largest of all toothed whales and is considered a vulnerable species.
While similar mass beachings are more common in the oceans, they are extremely rare in the Mediterranean, occurring once every 150-200 years, said Giuseppe Notarbartolo di Sciara, a marine biologist and head of a conservation group.
Speaking to Italy's Sky TV, he said the incident may have been caused by noise from military exercises or surveys for underwater mineral deposits that can confuse whales and interfere with their communication.

"When a sperm whale washes up on the beach it's usually already dead," he said. "When an entire pod ends up on the shore it's difficult to think that the cause is natural, otherwise it would happen more often."
Scientists had taken tissue samples from the whales to try to determine the cause of the beaching while authorities were working on the difficult job of burying the huge carcasses.

Dead whale washed back out to sea

The dead whale was washed up at Barry in the Vale of GlamorganA dead minke whale thought to have been stranded in the Bristol Channel has been washed out to sea again after beaching on the south Wales coast. The spectacle of the 33ft (10m) creature brought many onlookers to the Knap at Barry, Vale of Glamorgan. But after much of the day on the beach it was dislodged by the rising tide and drifted out into the channel again. It is believed to have been initially sighted off Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, on Monday. Rescuers from Somerset had tried unsuccessfully to tow it out to sea before it appeared again at Barry on Tuesday morning. It was then thought to have been taken in an easterly direction by the tide, towards the direction of Barry Island.The whale was initially spotted off Burnham-on-Sea Vale of Glamorgan council said it would monitor the situation with a view to removing it if it washes up somewhere else. Dave Ball, coastguard rescue officer with Barry Coastguard Rescue Team, said: "It has clearly been dead for some days at least. This sort of thing does happen from time to time. "There have been reports of a dead whale in the sea here for some time." Water-bikers Derek Jones and his 12-year-old son Sean, from Bristol, spotted the mammal still alive in the estuary at about 1700 BST on Monday. They unsuccessfully tried to tow it back out to sea with a rope attached to their water bike. Mark Simmonds, science director at the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, said: "Assuming it is indeed a minke whale, they are fairly commonly seen close to the shore around the UK, but more so in the north rather than the south. "The minke whale is the smallest of the filter feeding whales that we often see in the UK. "When whales are sick or wounded they might come ashore and the size of this whale is quite large." He said he was sure the father and son meant well, "but towing it is not ideal as it could cause more harm - you should always call the experts." BBC

Stranded Whale Dies; Calf Euthanized

A whale that was stranded in shallow waters off Hollywood Beach Monday afternoon has died, and animal experts euthanized its calf.The whales were spotted in the water off the coast between Michigan and Johnson Streets.Photos: SlideshowVideo The Marine Animal Rescue Society sent animal specialists to help the mammals, which they believed to be a mother and her calf.Beachgoers rushed into the water to help the mother whale, which came ashore around noon. Hal Wallace, of Pembroke Pines, said he was forced to become a marine biologist for a few hours."She was acting pretty calm, and then when everybody was around him and he was on shore, he didn't want to breathe. So I told everyone, 'Let's just let him swim away from shore,' and he started moving on his own," Wallace told Local 10's Roger Lohse.A few blocks down the beach, the beaked whale calf wandered in the shallow water, looking for its mother after the two apparently became separated. Beachgoers were excited by the encounter with wildlife, but rescue workers were concerned."They usually come ashore for a reason. They're here because they're not well. It's their instinct to come to the beach when they're in that situation," said Blair Mays of NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service.Biologists said the animals were beaked whales, a rare deepwater species that scientists know little about. The mother was full-grown at about 16 feet long.Eventually, rescuers corralled the calf and took it to its mother, which had come ashore for a second time. The sick mother whale did what a mother of any species would do: It tried to break free of its rescuers to save its calf. The calf, too, was clearly eager to get close to its mother.But in a matter of minutes, the joy beachgoers felt when the two mammals reunited turned somber when the mother began to thrash violently in the water and then became still."A lot of times, whales go into something called death throes right before they die, and we were witness to that, unfortunately," Mays said.Beaked whales will not survive in captivity, and the calf was too young to fend for itself in the wild. Workers decided it would be most humane to put the calf down. Beachgoers were saddened by the way their encounter with the wild came to an end."It breaks my heart because I'm a mom and I know how moms feel about their babies," said beachgoer Phyllis Collins, who fought back tears as she spoke.The two mammals will be taken to the Marine Animal Rescue Society's laboratory on Key Biscayne, where biologists will perform necropsies in the hope of learning more about the rare species of whale.

Rare Pygmy Killer Whale washes up at Ulladulla

Hundreds of people flocked to Ulladulla's Racecourse Beach over the weekend for a glimpse of a Pygmy Killer Whale - albeit a dead one.The carcass, measuring approximately 2.7 metres in length, washed up on Friday night.It was removed from the beach by National Parks and Wildlife Service personnel on Monday afternoon with the skull to be sent to the Australian Museum.Mike Jarman from the National Parks and Wildlife Service believes the carcass may have been floating for several days before being washed up on Racecourse Beach.While the carcass was still in a reasonable condition, it was decomposing quickly and starting to smell.Mr Jarman inspected the carcass on Saturday afternoon.He said its length, weight (approximately 200 kilograms) and the fact that it had very worn teeth all indicated that it was a fully-grown adult whale that most probably died of natural causes. Pygmy Killer Whales are relatively small in comparison to other whales and are often mistaken in the wild for other species including melon-headed whales and juvenile false killer whales.They have a rounded head with no beak and narrow gradually from the head to the tail fin.The Pygmy Killer Whale is considered extremely aggressive and has been known to attack humans and other whales. It has also been observed attacking, killing and eating other cetacean species such as the Common Dolphin.The species is considered naturally rare but is found in tropical and sub-tropical waters worldwide. They move in large groups and tend to steer clear of vessels with a preference for deep waters away from coastlines.Pygmy Killer Whales are rarely seen in the wild and are mostly known through strandings and net entanglements.Mr Jarman has been lucky enough to see Pygmy Killer Whales in the wild off Wollongong and told the Milton Ulladulla Times they looked like "torpedoes" in the water.

Climate change to bring more whale beachings

Experts studying the mass beaching of whales along Australia's coast have warned that such tragedies could become more frequent as global warming brings the mammals' food stocks closer to shore.Almost 90 long-finned pilot whales and bottlenose dolphins died after washing up last week at Hamelin Bay, on the country's west coast.It was the second mass stranding in March, and took the total number of cetaceans to beach in southern Australia in the past four months beyond 500, including a single stranding of almost 200 on King Island.Researchers tracking the beaching of whales in the region since 1920 said strandings tended to occur in 12-year cycles which coincided with cooler, nutrient-rich ocean currents moving from the south and swelling fish stocks."These animals, most of the time they're trying to find food, that's what they do," said the project's Corey Bradshaw, from Adelaide University."If you bring them closer to an area that could be dangerous, simply because there's more food there than there normally is you'd expect to find these temporal peaks in strandings, and that's exactly what we've found," Bradshaw told AFP.The current cycle last peaked in the 2004/2005 southern hemisphere summer, said Bradshaw, when there were 30 strandings in a period of weeks and a new animal washed up every four days.The total number of stranding events that summer was almost equivalent to those recorded for the entire previous year, he said, adding that the numbers again appeared to be reaching a peak."With climate change it is more likely that these kinds of oscillations will be more variable so you get more extreme conditions," he said."Where you maybe get a really cold pulse once every ten years it might happen every five years, and we're already seeing that.""We could see more and more frequent strandings simply as a function of higher frequency (of) extreme events," he added.Little concrete was known about what caused whales to beach en masse, according to marine scientist Catherine Kemper, who said the theories were almost endless.Only highly social species beached in groups, she said, and if one creature got into trouble or fled a predator such as a killer whale the rest would follow.Geomagnetic interference from elements such as iron ore could also scramble a cetacean's sonar, and complex coastlines such as that of Tasmania could be difficult to navigate, said Kemper, of the South Australian museum."Toothed whales have echo location, and one of the theories is that something happens to their ability to navigate," she said.The island of Tasmania, Australia's southernmost state, also had a narrow continental shelf, meaning there was deep water close to the coast."If a few of them come onshore the rest follow because of this incredible social bond," said Kemper.Storm events could also impair navigation by stirring up sediment, said government scientist Nick Gales, who works for the Antarctic authority. "This becomes incredibly confusing for animals that use sound in the water column to navigate in the shallower waters," he said. "There is no real way of predicting these (incidents). "The main advances in science have been in trying to deal with those animals once they are ashore, understanding a lot more about the animals from access to them and most recently in actually tracking animals that are able to be refloated and pushed out to sea." Of the pod which came ashore at Hamelin Bay, 11 were released back into the ocean using cranes fitted with giant slings. Once lifted to a truck, the 3.5-tonne mammals were transported 15 kilometres (nine miles) to a more sheltered harbour for release. It was only the third time such an ambitious rescue of whales had been attempted in Western Australia state, and the first involving the long-finned pilot species. Only three managed to return to deeper waters, with the remaining seven either euthanised or dying after re-beaching themselves, including a female and her calf. Kemper said the success of rescue operations often depended on the fate of the "ringleaders". "Either they die and (rescuers) get them out of the way, or they get them alive and back out to sea," she said. "The chances of success for rescuing at least some are greater because, again, I guess it's like follow the leader." Ultimately though, Bradshaw said mass beachings remained one of nature's great mysteries. "There are reams of hypotheses, predilections and pet theories, most of them have absolutely no basis whatsoever," he said. "Let's face it, this is biological life, we're all prone to making mistakes."