More than 50 pilot whales died on Sunday after stranding on a beach on the Isle of Lewis in northwestern Scotland. It was Britain’s biggest mass stranding since 2011, sea rescuers say.
Coastguards, police and rescue volunteers found 55 whales – both adults and calves – stranded on the beach on Sunday morning, according to British charity Divers Marine Life Rescue, which coordinated the response. By the time rescuers arrived on the beach to administer first aid to the surviving whales, a majority were already dead, the charity added. At 3:30 p.m. local time, rescue teams decided to euthanize the surviving animals “for welfare reasons”, after it was determined that rough waves and shallow beach conditions made it unsafe to refloat them.
Only one of the 55 whales survived, a spokesman for the local government’s Western Isles Council said in an email. The whale was one of two successfully rescued back to sea. The other whale beached itself and subsequently died, British Divers Marine Life Rescue said.
It can take a huge effort to save a whale’s life after it has stranded. Pilot whales — which are in the same family as dolphins and porpoises — can grow to be 24 feet long and weigh up to 6,600 pounds. When lying on the beach, they can gradually crush themselves or their blood circulation can be cut off, releasing toxins that poison the animal, marine biologists say.
“They probably all belonged to the same family, a unit that has traveled together for decades,” said Daren Grover, managing director of Project Jonah New Zealand, a charity responding to whale strandings in New Zealand.
The Zoological Society of London’s Cetacean Strandings Investigation Program has recorded more than 17,000 stranded cetaceans since its inception in 1990, referring to the animal class that includes pilot whales, dolphins and porpoises. Last fall, 230 pilot whales stranded on Tasmania’s western coast.
In 2011, about 70 pilot whales were trapped in shallow waters off the coast of Sutherland in Scotland. But a quick response led to the successful refloating of 20 of the whales. This time, the rescue efforts faced “major obstacles” from the start, said Dan Jarvis, director of welfare and conservation at the rescue organization.
“They actually found one of the worst places to be stranded: on a remote island on a remote beach on a Sunday,” he said.
The Isle of Lewis is located about 31 miles off the northwest coast of Scotland and is only accessible by ferry or plane. The rescue organization was short of volunteers and equipment was scarce. Because there was no mobile phone signal within a radius of three kilometers around the beach, new communication channels had to be set up. It amounted to a large-scale co-ordination effort involving more than 50 rescuers, including volunteers, the coastguard, police and the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service.
The charity said the whale pod may have followed one of the whales ashore after it struggled to give birth. “pilot whales are notorious for their strong social bonds,” the charity’s statement said. “So if one whale gets into trouble and strands, the rest will follow.”
Pilot whales, highly social creatures, are the species ‘most susceptible’ to stranding, according to the Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme, or SMASS. But the causes of their inadvertent isolation vary widely, marine biologists say. Whales can be thrown off by sonar or led astray by a sick or injured whale.
On Monday, a team from SMASS was collecting tissue samples to determine the cause of the stranding. A final conclusion could take weeks or months to determine, Mr Jarvis said.
