The New Zealand Herald reported on Tuesday of this week that 71 pilot whales had stranded on a beach near Owenga in the Chatham Islands, which lie about 800km off New Zealand’s main islands. An official from the Department of Conservation said that re-floating the whales was “not an option” and that any which remained alive had been euthanized.
There is a very long history of mass pilot whale strandings on the Chatham Islands, going back to 1918 when an estimated 1,000 pilot whales stranded. More recently, 477 whales died within a few days of each other in a double stranding in 2022. At the time, Daren Grover of local whale charity Project Jonah said that trying to re-float the whales was complicated by the risks of shark attacks on human volunteers and the pilot whales themselves.
As with nearly all stranding events, there is almost no indication of what may have caused it. The islands have gently sloping sandy beaches and speaking to the Herald in 2022, Grover said that as the whales swam closer to land in search for food, they would quickly find themselves in shallow water. “They rely on echolocation and yet it doesn’t tell them that they are running out of water”, he said. “They come closer and closer to shore and become disorientated. The tide can then drop from below them and before they know it, they are stranded on the beach.”
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