Beached Whales

I found an interesting article from Time by Kayla Webley that discusses a large amount of beached whales. Its a little dated from 2011 but super relevant to our class and fascinating so I'm sharing it here.

The main subject of the article is the pilot whales that beached themselves in Tasmania--in the biggest incident, 194 beached themselves, and 140 were dead by the time officials arrived on the scene, so only the remaining 54 were rescued and survived.  What was especially rare was that this was the fourth beaching over a course of less than four months!  This is what got the event its media coverage from Time.

I was interested in learning about why this might have happened, so a quick Wikipedia search gave me some possible causes of whale beachings, or, as they call it: Cetacean stranding.
1. Natural: rough water, old age/weakness, grave errors in navigation, etc.
2. Follow me: big whales following smaller dolphins into water that is too shallow for them, sad face
3. Sonar (very much a theory): can cause decompression sickness, also strandings have happened immediately after sonar was installed, leading to this theory.

This whole beaching business is pretty interesting and also really sad.  I know we've talked a lot about how cars are the most dangerous and we'll be seeing a lot of road kill, but it would be so saddening to find a bunch of dead pilot whales in a parking lot by the beach, as is pictured above.

Brittany Hallawell

sources:
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2040762_2040769_2040788,00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cetacean_stranding