Mass Orkney pilot whale stranding

A pod of 77 long-finned pilot whales have all died after stranding on a beach on the island of Sanday, part of the Scottish Orkney archipelago, in what could be one of the largest cetacean mass strandings around the UK for almost a century.

The stranding occurred almost a year to the day after 55 pilot whales were stranded on the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides, off Scotland’s western coast.

The British Divers Marine Life Rescue (BDMLR) received a report of ‘up to 100’ long-finned pilot whales (Globicephala melas) on the morning of Thursday, 11 July. A regional team was dispatched to the site of the stranding on Tresness Beach where they found 77 animals ‘high up on the beach’.

Only 12 of the pilot whales remained alive, indicating that they had already been stranded for several hours.

The pod comprised a number of mature males, some measuring up to 7m (22ft) in length. There were also females and calves among the group.

The soft sand in which the pilot whales were stranded made it virtually impossible for the surviving animals to refloat themselves when the tide came in, and unfortunately, the difficult decision was taken to euthanise the survivors.

In an update on Thursday evening, a BDMLR spokesperson wrote: ‘Sadly the remaining 12 pilot whales have been euthanased due to their condition deteriorating from the many hours they have spent stranded on the beach resulting in crush injury from their own weight and the high likelihood that they have inhaled water with the incoming tide.’

The Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme (SMASS) is carrying out post-mortem examinations to determine why the pilot whales became stranded. Early test results indicate the animals were healthy, and some of the whales were found to have recently fed.

In an interview with BBC Scotland, SMASS cetacean expert, Mariel ten Doeschate, said that the animals were stranded close together, which is ‘a behavioural stress response’, possibly indicating they had been frightened by loud sound or a nearby predator, which cause the group to tighten.

Orcas (killer whales) are known to frequent the waters around the Orkney Islands, so SMASS is investigating whether any had been sighted in the area at the time when the pilot whales were stranded.

Despite the name, pilot whales are actually the second-largest species of dolphin – behind the equally misnomered ‘killer whales’, which are also members of the dolphin family – rather than ‘true’ whales. They are among the most abundant cetacean species in the North Atlantic with a second population present across the southern Pacific Ocean.

The largest mass stranding of pilot whales ever recorded occurred in 1918, when some 1,000 whales beached themselves on the Chatham Islands archipelago, 800km east of New Zealand’s South Island, in 1918.

The whales will be buried on land after environmental regulators ruled that they should not be discarded at sea. The challenge of burying 77 large whales in eight large pits around the islands is complicated by the need to check the ground for historical artefacts from Orkney’s extensive number of archaeological sites.

For more information about cetacean strandings and how to report them, visit bdmlr.org.uk, or make a donation towards the charity’s important work at www.justgiving.com/bdmlr

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