Rescuers optimistic that New Zealand whale crisis is over
February 12, 2017
A representative from the Department of Conservation (DOC) said on Sunday he was cautiously optimistic that a string of whale strandings on New Zealand's shores was over.
"We've pulled our boats out of the water," regional conservation manager Andrew Lamason told news agency AFP.
The crisis started on Friday, when 416 pilot whales were found on Farewell Spit, a 26-kilometer (16 miles) long tongue of land that reaches into the Tasman Sea like a hook.
"You could hear the sounds of splashing, of blowholes being cleared, of sighing," said Cheree Morrison, who discovered the whales on Friday. "The young ones were the worst. Crying is the only way to describe it."
On Saturday, a group of 240 mammals stranded three kilometers from the Friday beaching, but managed to refloat themselves overnight. In total, more than 650 pilot whales stranded at beaches in the past three days.
Volunteer turnout
Hundreds of volunteers, from farmers to tourists, came to help the stranded ocean mammals. They doused the whales with buckets of water to keep them cool, refloated animals during high tide and formed human chains across the beach to prevent further strandings.
"It was an excellent public response," DOC spokesperson Herb Christophers said. "People seem to have an emotional attachment to marine mammals. They've been singing songs to them, giving them specific names, treating them as kindred spirits."
Despite the efforts of the helpers, about 350 whales died. Most of them were among the animals found on Friday and already dead when they were discovered. Twenty animals were euthanized. Pathologists are carrying out necropsies on some of the deceased whales to determine what might have caused the mass stranding. There are different theories as to why whales travel too far inshore, from chasing prey to escaping a predator.
New Zealand has one of the highest rates of whale beachings. Friday night's stranding marked the third-biggest in recorded history. The largest was in 1918, when about 1,000 pilot whales came ashore on the Chatham Islands, situated several hundreds of kilometers east from the two main islands. In 1985, about 450 whales stranded near Auckland in the north of the country.
mb/tj (AFP, AP, dpa)