By Amarachi Orie, CNN
(CNN) — More than 40 pilot whales have died on a New Zealand beach following a mass stranding that rescuers described as “difficult and distressing.”
The pod of pilot whales was found stranded on the Ngawi coast near the village of Cape Palliser on the southern tip of New Zealand’s North Island just after 8 a.m. local time on Thursday, the country’s Department of Conservation (DOC) said in a statement posted on Facebook that morning.
At the time, at least 20 whales were known to be ashore, with four still alive, the environmental organization Project Jonah New Zealand said in a post on Facebook that afternoon.
The charity added that it was working with the DOC and the local iwi, a group of Māori tribes, to conduct health assessments and prepare for the living whales to be refloated at high tide.
However, in an update on Friday afternoon local time, the DOC said a total of 43 whales were found on the Ngawi to Mangatoetoe coast and “unfortunately none of these are believed to have survived.”
Many of the whales, covering “several kilometres of coastline,” were already dead when they were discovered, and those found alive “succumbed throughout the day,” Project Jonah said in its own update.
“It was a difficult and distressing event for those who were involved in the response,” the charity said. “We are grateful to the locals who were first on the scene and supported the whales that were found alive, keeping them cool and as comfortable as possible.”
The DOC said it is “now working with iwi to manage the burial of the taonga,” or highly prized heritage.
North Island’s southern coastline is “exposed to the powerful swells of Cook Strait,” Project Jonah said. These conditions, combined with the loose gravel beaches and “sharp” rocks, made the environment “especially challenging,” and the remoteness of the location further challenged responders.
‘Very sad’ and ‘strange’
Fisherman Andrew Sim described the incident as “very sad.” He told CNN affiliate RNZ Thursday that he had spent more than four decades on the coast and had witnessed whale strandings before but had never seen pilot whales come ashore.
“It’s most strange that they’ve come in here, there’s just no reason for it, to be honest. Just bad luck, I don’t know,” Sim said.
Pilot whales are “prolific stranders,” according to the DOC, but what causes mass strandings is not well understood.
“They happen to species which tend to be highly social and it is likely that all or part of a social group becomes stranded at the same time,” Ian L. Boyd, professor of biology at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and former chief scientific adviser at the UK’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said in a statement shared with CNN Friday by the Science Media Centre.
“Mass strandings can tend to happen in particular locations often where there is a shallow shelving coastline,” Boyd added. “It is possible that a whole social group gets disorientated and caught by a falling tide, but this is almost certainly only part of much more complex set of causes.”
Pilot whales’ highly social behavior means that if one whale loses its way then others come to its aid, according to the DOC, which said the “most likely” theory for mass strandings is that the animals’ echolocation is not well-suited to shallow, sloping waters.
It is currently summer in New Zealand, which is when the whales follow common food sources inshore and when most mass strandings occur. The largest pilot whale stranding in the country involved an estimated 1,000 whales at the Chatham Islands in 1918, according to the DOC.
Several mass stranding events in Oceania have garnered attention in the last few years.
In 2022, around 500 pilot whales died in mass strandings near shark-infested waters on remote New Zealand islands.
In February last year, more than 150 whales beached off the coast of Tasmania, Australia – and all of them either died or were euthanized – in the first mass stranding of the animals in Tasmania in 50 years.
The previous year, 28 pilot whales died after around 160 whales beached off the coast of Western Australia. The majority of the pod were returned to sea.
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