Whale Strandings/Beachings – Thursday 24th August 2023
Recently, a large group of Pilot Whales beached in WA Australia and despite efforts to rescue them, they all perished.
This was the first time I saw their behaviour, prior to beaching themselves. This wasn’t a group of whales that lost their bearings and swam off course.
They had ceased swimming and were in a close group, then at some point they formed a tight oval/round shaped huddle, so they were all touching. What that told me is that they knew what they were all about to do, that it was their way of expressing their farewells to each other and though they were frightened, they were intent upon beaching.
Whales see death regularly, unlike most of us, so I would think that they are aware of what will happen if they leave the water. I was very troubled by it, like everyone else, so with this new insight to their behaviour, I have given it a great deal of thought.
Decades ago, my thought was that they must be ill and fearing drowning, were beaching. This still could be the case for some strandings.
Then there is the possibility of harm to their ears and whales’ hearing must be crucial to their survival in every way, not to mention pain from ear damage. They wouldn’t hear boats, hear each other for example, so that’s being looked at as a possible cause too.
It occurred to me that if this recent beaching of the Pilot whales is as it appeared, then there would be excessive adrenaline showing in analysis.
In looking up some facts, I discovered that fossils had been found indicating whale beaching event/s? from millions of years ago.
However, if it was something that occurred regularly and often, then we should see evidence of that. The point though is that it did occur, and well before we were a source of distress for them. Then I read that whilst whaling was occurring, strandings appeared to cease. An example of the losses, I read that in the 1950’s we killed over 400,000 whales, in the 1960’s we killed over 700,000. The estimate is approximately 3 million whales between 1920 to 1970. I think we can probably assume that there were additional whales killed but not accounted for. Most of those whales (had they lived) would have passed away by now and their remains would have supported armies of smaller sea creatures, which of course they didn’t, so we had a massive impact there and totally out of sight at the bottom of the sea. And the other impact is that all the food those whales would have consumed, also didn’t occur. Which meant that those whales still remaining, although greatly diminished in numbers, would have had abundant food available to them.
As I understand it, the whales that beach are all seafood eaters. They don’t eat meat.
The beaching of Orca is seemingly rare, and I learnt that there are an Orca population who only eat seafood and of course those Orca that we are well familiar with who will eat meat. And having seen footage of a wild seal leap onto a boat to escape a meat eating Orca, they are very shark-like and frightening to their prey. It would be helpful to know if any large beachings of Orca have occurred and which variety they were, but in my search I couldn’t find any significant mass beachings of Orca.
So, whaling on the huge scale ceased in the 1970’s, except for a handful of countries who still engage in this activity and combined, they kill approximately 1000 whales yearly.
50 years on and various whale population numbers, for some species, have improved, they aren’t at their previous populations but are stable, unfortunately though, some species are doing very badly, numbering in just the few hundreds sadly.
Now, during this time we humans have greatly increased in numbers and we have more boats out fishing, who have become very proficient at finding the seafood that we and the whales eat. And mass strandings are again a regular occurrence. There appears to be a correlation in our growing population and fishing activities, with the seafood-eating whales that are stranding.
And to repeat something I’ve stated before, when we over-fish and the ocean life has to find it’s food too, then the remainder is what is left to reproduce, at some point there isn’t enough to go around and generally the smallest and or least aggressive, can’t sustain themselves. They are then using all their energy to find the food for energy to find the next meal. They become weaker and less healthy. There isn’t any playtime and they will become fearful of predatory animals, knowing they can’t outrun them. Beaching will at some point, become the best option rather than violent carnage by predators.
Because whales seem to have regions that they live and remain in, this would suggest that whales who live in regions where we don’t fish would have sufficient food supplies while where we do concentrate our fishing activities, whales in those regions would be experiencing food shortage. So we could see a healthy well fed group of Pilot whales and presume the entire species obviously have plenty to eat.
If this is one of the causes of whales beaching, then the behaviour of the Pilot whales prior to stranding themselves in WA would have had significant adrenaline coarsing and if that can be shown, then we have evidence that they were very afraid and knew what they were about to do and that should then help us, to help them.
Like the horse, we are indebted to the whale.
Fiona MacLeod (C)