The miserable stranding of hundreds of whales along Farewell Spit and the quick response from volunteers and whale lovers at the tip of the South Island, New Zealand, last week, caught the world’s attention.
More than 650 pilot whales beached themselves along Farewell Spit in two separate mass strandings. About 350 whales died and 100 were refloated by volunteers. More than 200 swam away on their own, much to the relief of the locals. The death toll includes 20 whales that were euthanized.
The incident is not new to New Zealand. The Friday’s event was the countries third biggest in numbers. In 1918, about 1000 pilot whales beached themselves on the Chatham Islands and in 1985, about 450 got stranded in Auckland.
But what was most heartening was the way the volunteers, who included local farmers and tourists, swung into action. They spent hours, and some of them days, dousing the whales with buckets of water to keep them cool and trying to refloat them.
The volunteers also formed human chains in the water to try to stop the creatures from beaching themselves again.
But why do whales get stranded on the first place?
There are many notions on why and when this happen. They include chasing prey too far inshore, trying to protect a sick member of the group or while escaping a predator. The animals’ social organisation and behaviour increases the possibility.
Most of the strandings happen in species that live in a large social group such as the sperm whale, oceanic dolphins, usually pilot and killer whales, and a few beaked whale species. It does not happen among those that lead a solitary life.
Sometimes, the stranding may happen posthumously. That is, what we see on the beaches are the carcasses of dead cetaceans (which include whales, dolphins and porpoises) that have been floated to the surface. Currents can bring thousands of all those dead whales to the shore as a whole.
Most carcasses never reach the coast and are scavenged or decomposed enough to sink to the ocean bottom, where the carcass forms the basis of a unique local ecosystem called whale fall.
