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400 Whales Strand Themselves on NZ Beach

#1
Yazata Offline
It isn't just rich American Democratic party celebrities vowing to wash up in New Zealand. It's whales too.

Some 400 small pilot whales were found yesterday stranded on a remote rural beach. About 275 of them were already dead as local volunteers rushed to try to save the rest. They refloated about 100 of them, but 50 promptly restranded themselves. The other 50 weren't swimming very actively and "they're not looking great out there'' according to NZ conservation officials. It sounds like some have been refloated more than once.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/02/10/...beach.html

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/marine/news/ar...d=11798056

I wonder what caused the whales to do this. Mass poisoning? Being chased by large sharks or a rival whale pod? Some kind of group navigational error? An apocalyptic whale death cult?

Latest reports here:

https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zeal...-refloated

Apparently there's 200 more stranded whales on a beach some 11 km away and a couple of hundred fresh ones in a new pod are in the water near the beaches with unknown intentions, maybe intending to strand themselves too, maybe intent on keeping the stranded ones from escaping, or maybe just watching.

A report from just 15 minutes ago says the ones in the water have started heading for shore.

http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/3...ewell-spit

Update edit: Hundreds of rescue volunteers have formed a human chain in the shallow water to try to prevent the new whales from stranding themselves.
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#2
elte Offline
The last option is closest to one I heard.  The ocean has gotten very noisy in recent decades although it should be relatively quiet south of New Zealand.
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#3
Secular Sanity Offline
(Feb 10, 2017 11:36 PM)Yazata Wrote: I wonder what caused the whales to do this. Mass poisoning? Being chased by large sharks or a rival whale pod? Some kind of group navigational error? An apocalyptic whale death cult?

It’s a stranding hotspot, suggesting that the shape of the sea floor might be the cause.

"Of the cetaceans, pilot whales are among the most common stranders. Because of their strong social bonds, whole groups of pilot whales will strand. Single stranders have been recorded and these are usually diseased. Group stranding tends to be of mostly healthy individuals. Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain group strandings. When using magnetic fields for navigation, the whales have been suggested to get perplexed by geomagnetic anomalies or they may be following a sick member of their group that got stranded. The pod also may be following a member of high importance that got stranded and a secondary social response makes them keep returning. Researchers from New Zealand have successfully used secondary social responses to keep a stranding pod of long-finned pilot whales from returning to the beach. In addition, the young members of the pod were taken offshore to buoys, and their distress calls lured the older whales back out to sea." [1]

"Their echolocation system can have difficulty picking up very gently-sloping coastlines. This theory accounts for mass beaching hot spots such as Ocean Beach, Tasmania and Geographe Bay, Western Australia where the slope is about half a degree (approximately 8 m (26 ft) deep 1 km (0.62 mi) out to sea). The University of Western Australia Bioacoustics group proposes that repeated reflections between the surface and ocean bottom in gently-sloping shallow water may attenuate sound so much that the echo is inaudible to the whales. Stirred up sand as well as long-lived microbubbles formed by rain may further exacerbate the effect."
 [2]
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#4
Zinjanthropos Offline
Is it just me or does anyone else think whales almost always strand themselves during the night? Anyone know the ratio between day and night stranding?
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