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Africa Panda Newsletter 2009 06

Beached-whale
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We are sharing with you some surprising and unknown things about South Africa. Did you know about them:

The “Big 5” in South Africa are lion, rhino, buffalo, leopard and elephant. It would soon become the “Big 7” when whale and shark are officially added to this tourist attraction. We have discussed whale in our June newsletter 2008, whale again becomes theme of the month for one extraordinary recent incident – mass stranding at Kommetjie which has resulted in shooting of beached false killer whales.

The last few days of May, a school of 55 false killer whales have beached at Kommetjie’s Long Beach near Cape Town. These intelligent mammal species grew up to 6 m long and weigh around 2 tonne, some even were carrying young. The reason for their behaviour is still unknown. Both related marine rescue authorities and volunteers from the public have tried different ways to assist. Some volunteers have tried to push animals back out to sea, but resulting many of them kept heading back to shore. This might due to social factors propel among the whales and all these rescue efforts by untrained volunteers might prove fatal to the animal. The joint rescue team explored all the options and after hours of failed rescue attempts, they have decided to put the distressed wild animals down to avoid further suffering. Though the implementation of euthanasia is part of formal wildlife rescue protocol in many countries, it has emotionally triggered the criticism of the concerned and frustrated public and media. Afterall, we have so decimated the numbers of whales that we cannot afford to lose more. This environmental tragedy is debatable; however the real tragedy is the ongoing, slow death of the planet’s oceans. Whales, more than any other animal, have become icons of that struggle to survive – which we know but don’t truly believe or grieve about until we witness the traumatic event.

Mass stranding is the beaching of two or more whales (sometimes up to a couple of hundreds) are much more perplexing to explain. Some suggested reasons are: mass suicide happened when whale converge around a member of a pod who sends out distress calls, who is ill or disorientated or who has made some error of judgement into dangerously shallow waters. It could be following the food source shorewards, which there is speculation that climate may be responsible. Besides, navigation failures related to the whales’ echolocation abilities is another cause. Lastly the result of human-generated noise pollution such as from ships’ engines and sonar could have bad effect on the organs and system of the whale’s body which caused the strange behaviour. Click here for related video clip.



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