Why does whale beaching occur

Rescue teams will only try to refloat an animal if it is healthy enough to survive. The only other options are taking the animal into captivity—in countries that allow it—or euthanasia. While harrowing, Jarvis argues this is the best welfare decision rather than subjecting a wild animal to captivity.

Strandings do help scientists better understand these animals, particularly difficult-to-study species such as beaked whales. Deaville also points out that strandings can even be a good sign for the species because it can indicate healthier population numbers: Put simply, with more animals out there, more of them are likely to strand from natural causes even if other threats are minimized. All rights reserved. Topography Coastal topography and tidal ranges make some regions traps for marine mammals.

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If beached whales are discovered, humans can attempt to return some of the whales to the ocean and prolong their lives by drenching them with water until an attempt to return them can be made.

Sadly, most beached whales and dolphins end up dying. This can be due to dehydration or the result of their internal organs being crushed while on land. When high tide comes in, the whale could actually drown once water covers their blowhole. Whale beaching is not a new phenomenon. Records of cetacean stranding go back as far as a century ago, but we also know that they happened long before then, as well.

Sometimes, a lone whale will beach by accident; maybe he has swum into water that is too shallow and can no longer swim. If a whale becomes sick, she might also become too tired to swim. Again, she will eventually wash ashore from exhaustion and an inability to swim.

But mass strandings are also a somewhat common behavior in whale and dolphin populations and those are even more puzzling. Scientists and researchers have proposed that changes in water temperature could be a cause of beachings, which means that whale beaching could be directly correlated to climate change and global warming.

In fact, the easiest reasons to accept why whales beach themselves are accidents: inclement weather, difficulty giving birth, hunting in too-shallow waters, and mistakes made in navigating. Bigger whales may also strand because they are closely following larger dolphins or porpoises into shallow waters; while the dolphins may be able to escape the coastal waters, larger whales may become trapped and therefore, beach.

Most whales are also extremely family oriented. One hypothesis behind the cause of mass strandings is this strong family bond. If one whale becomes sick, lost, old, or confused, the other whales in the pod might just follow suit. After all, they do everything together. It could result in the pod tragically dying together, as a unit. In the latter case, whales will stop swimming and therefore, eventually wash ashore.

These are the main reasons for whale beaching that humans can make sense of, though there are many other proposed reasons that have still not been confirmed. The most commonly accepted reasons that whales beach include getting trapped in too-shallow, coastal waters or a sick, disoriented, old, or confused whale who gets too close to shore.

But noise pollution is making it harder for them to hear one other. Credit: Shutterstock. In such a case, he says, many subgroups may have come together and the leader of one, perhaps confused or starving, may have led her own companions astray. Sometimes a sick animal will move to shallow water to try to survive. Whales are marine mammals after all — they breathe air. Workers cover a beached pilot whale but not its blowhole to keep the sun off as they attempt to rescue it after a mass stranding at Marion Bay, Tasmania, in Whales do not normally venture into shallow water.

But some stretches of coast can trap them in the geography, with waters shifting suddenly from deep water to sand banks and mud. In another very rare event in September , three humpback whales took a wrong turn inland and ended up in a Northern Territory river filled with crocodiles. Two quickly turned back out to sea, but one whale travelled upstream more than 30 kilometres before returning safely to the open ocean more than a week later, at high tide, under the anxious gaze of rangers.

By the time the whales realise they have strayed too far, they are trapped. They panic. In Hervey Bay, Franklin and his wife, Trish, have studied humpback whale mothers teaching their young to navigate the shallows without beaching.

Tasmania and neighbouring New Zealand are hotspots for mass strandings — the site of the September pilot whale stranding, Macquarie Harbour, is notoriously treacherous for boats, let alone whales. The whales stranded on a sandbank at Macquarie Harbour off Strahan in September. You can breathe but gravity is crushing your lungs against your chest. And from the moment they wash up, they are running out of time. In the case of larger whales, Meynecke says their bones can break as their own weight crushes them.

The whales can also drown on the beach if they are leaning with their blowhole underwater. So rescuers must move fast. The first 48 hours are critical. Still, beached whales can be saved. During some rescues, researchers have used satellite tags to track those carried back out to sea and found pleasing proof of survival. Three weeks after the Tasmanian stranding, amid the grim task of carcass clean-up, three whales were discovered still swimming around the inlet, and successfully returned to the open sea.

Franklin recalls guiding out a beached minke whale at Hervey Bay as the tide came in, and the moment it started swimming again on its own. Franklin still remembers the strong crowd that came to the aid of a humpback on the Sunshine Coast about a decade earlier. Moving just one whale is exhausting, he says, and there are only so many boats and so many trained volunteers on hand. Usually, teams will need to wait for high tide, where there is more water near the animal, but sometimes when they are more submerged on sandbanks, crews will have to work almost full-time in the shallows.

It can be dangerous too, both for the rescuers and their charges, as animals thrash around. Speaking from the scene of the Tasmanian stranding, wildlife biologist Dr Kris Carlyon said crews had been rotated regularly but the job still took a physical and emotional toll. A pod of orcas, including a juvenile. It's a well-known and heartbreaking phenomenon. For every beached whale saved, there's a risk some will restrand themselves.