150 whales die in stranding in Australia

Yahoo News 30 Nov 08;

HOBART, Australia – A group of 150 whales that became stranded on a remote coastline in southern Australia were battered to death on rocks before rescuers could save them.

Officials from Tasmania state's Parks and Wildlife Service rushed Sunday in four-wheel-drive vehicles to the remote site at Sandy Cape after the long-finned pilot whales were spotted by air a day earlier.

A helicopter crew that arrived late Saturday found about a dozen of the whales injured but alive, said Warwick Brennan, a spokesman for the service.

Other officials and volunteers arrived by four-wheel-drive vehicle on Sunday and worked frantically to save those remaining, but they died, Brennan said.

The coastline is strewn with reefs and jagged rocks, making it much more dangerous for the stranded whales than if they had landed at a sandy beach, said Rosemary Gales, another wildlife service official.

"Because of the physical beating they take from stranding on rocks and surf, compared to sandy beach strandings, animals die more quickly," said Gales.

Officials in small boats steered about 30 whales that were part of the same pod as those stranded away from the bay where they went ashore. They were apparently responding to cries of distress from an injured whale and were in danger of becoming stuck too, Brennan said.

The operation comes one week after rescuers saved 11 pilot whales among more than 60 stranded on a beach in northwestern Tasmania, which is an island.

Strandings are not uncommon in Tasmania, where the whales pass by on their migration to and from Antarctic waters. It is not known why whales get stranded.

72 whales die in mass stranding in Australia: official
Yahoo News 30 Nov 08;

SYDNEY (AFP) – Seventy-two whales have died after becoming stranded on rocks in southern Australia, one week after 53 of the giant animals died nearby in a similar beaching, an official said Sunday.

The long-finned pilot whales are believed to have beached themselves at the rocky and remote Sandy Cape on the west coast of the southern island of Tasmania on Saturday.

"There are 72 deceased animals," Chris Arthur of Tasmania's Parks and Wildlife Service told AFP.

Arthur said rescuers had shepherded 32 more whales, which had been trapped in a channel offshore among reefs, to safety using a small boat and these animals were now swimming strongly.

Tasmanian officials were alerted to the beaching early Saturday and a helicopter inspection of the remote area showed that 12 were still alive, despite being badly cut by the rocks.

A rescue team reached the area Sunday but found only two of the pilot whales, which can reach up to more than seven metres (20 feet) in length and weigh up to three tonnes, alive.

"There were two alive in the rocky shore, but they died earlier this afternoon," Arthur said.

Rescuers had been afraid that the whales would not survive the night as they would have thrashed heavily on the rocks, unlike the 64 animals which beached on a sandy Tasmanian beach the previous week.

Eleven of those animals were saved after they were transported to another beach and dragged into deep water.

"On sand they tend to lie fairly quietly but when they land on rocks and in amongst boulders they thrash, they cut themselves. There's a lot of blood loss," the parks and wildlife service's Rosemary Gales told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on Saturday.

"We know from previous experience that when pilot whales strand on rocks, which these ones have, they die very quickly."

There are a number of whale strandings in Tasmania every year, but there is debate among scientists over causes the animals to beach themselves.