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223 Stranded Whales Rescue Themselves (npr.org)
More than 650 whales beached themselves in New Zealand, and more than 350 of them died. But now an anonymous reader shares NPR's report about a surprising result for the second group of whales.
When volunteer rescuers left the beach for the night Saturday, hundreds of survivors from the second stranding remained ashore. Then something curious happened: When the people returned Sunday morning, almost all the surviving whales were gone. All but 17 had left the beach and returned to the waters of Golden Bay overnight.
"We had 240 whales strand yesterday in the afternoon and we were fearful we were going to end up with 240 dead whales this morning," Herb Christophers, a spokesman for New Zealand's Department of Conservation, told Reuters. "But they self-rescued, in other words the tide came in and they were able to float off and swim out to sea."
"We had 240 whales strand yesterday in the afternoon and we were fearful we were going to end up with 240 dead whales this morning," Herb Christophers, a spokesman for New Zealand's Department of Conservation, told Reuters. "But they self-rescued, in other words the tide came in and they were able to float off and swim out to sea."
While it's good that some whales managed to escape, I find it extremely disconcerting that whales are beaching themselves en masse and we don't know why.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The lesson here is that returning beached whales to sea just returns them to the gene pool, harming the whale population at large.
If you want to save the whales, you must let the beach-weak whales die. If we keep returning them to the sea, we'll simply have a whale population that's dependent on humans to survive!
do you understand how big a whale is?