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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."
Rather than cause problems, as we can see a higher ocean level means more whales can return to the sea. What kind of monsters are you Warming Alarmists that want more whales to die, alone and sandy?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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!
But I guess that seems completely normal, and would not generate any clicks...
Nah, we've had saturation coverage of this event here in Aotearoa New Zealand. The second pod has been closely monitored and they did actually swim off.
It's good luck to be superstitious
It would have made a hell of a good headline for Procter & Gamble though.
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Whatever the reason, it's a natural behavior. Contemporary documentation of strandings dates back to at least the 16th century. Archaeological evidence suggest a stranding about 12,000 years ago. And the earliest evidence is for a possible mass stranding is about 6-9 million years ago.
So these strandings have been happening for a very, very long time. There is no reason to be disconcerted. Interest in the reasons why should be purely academic until prove to be unnatural. While there has been evidence correlating strandings with man-made activities, per scientific standards the burden of proof is upon those advocating such theories to prove a causal relationship.