Wellington- The fight to save scores of beached whales in one of New Zealand’s biggest whale strandings on record was far from over as more of the animals washed up on the coast late Saturday.
About 200 whales became beached at several different locations along the 23-kilometre Farewell Spit at the northern end of the South Island, the Department of Conservation (DOC) said in a statement.
Hundreds of volunteers were forced to abandon the beach at nightfall as work would be too dangerous. Another attempt to refloat the whales would be made at high tide on Sunday morning.
A total of 416 whales had washed up on the shore on Thursday night, of which between 250 and 300 died before they were discovered on Friday. Since then two more pods have arrived
Attempts to refloat the remaining 90 whales on Saturday morning was initially successful but 20 of those whales returned to the beach and had to be euthanized, the DOC said.
The others looked to be safe but – in spite of best efforts by up to 500 volunteers, including a group of 100 helpers forming a human chain in neck-deep water – the whales joined another pod and became stranded near the original site.
Yet another pod of whales were stranded not far from those.
Pathologists were carrying out necropsies on some of the dead whales to try to determine what caused the mass stranding.
“We want to try and determine if there’s an underlying reason why such a large number of whales stranded and died in such a short space of time,” veterinary pathologist Dr Stuart Hunter told the New Zealand Herald.
“It’s not unusual for pilot whales to strand en masse but this stranding is unusual due to the sheer number of whales involved and in such a small amount of time.”
According to the DOC, Friday’s was the third largest recorded whale stranding in New Zealand since the start of data collection in the 1800s.
Some 1,000 whales were stranded on the Chatham Islands in 1918 and 450 in Auckland in 1985.
-dpa
