On Monday, about 270 pilot whales got into difficulty on a sandbank at Macquarie Heads, near Strahan on Tasmania's west coast, about 190 kilometres from Hobart. Another 200 of the animals were found early on Wednesday, making it Tasmania's largest recordedstrandingevent. The Department of Primary Industry, Parks, Water and Environment (DPIPWE) said that about a third had died.
Marine biologists arrived in the area to carry out rescue operations. They planned to use specialized equipment such as special tarpaulins to push the whales back into the deep water. The local police also assisted in the rescue.
The whales that were stranded are Pilot Whales, and they are found in almost all the oceans of the world, according to the Marine conservation group. Pilot whales are in fact one of the largest members of the dolphin family, but they are treated as whales for the Marine Mammals Protection Regulations issued in 1992.They were named pilot whales because it was thought that each pod followed a ‘pilot' in the group.
Cetacean stranding, commonly known as beaching, is a phenomenon in which whales and dolphins strand themselves on land, usually on a beach. Several explanations for why cetaceans strand themselves have been proposed, including changes in water temperatures, unusual features of whales' echo location in certain surroundings, and geomagnetic disturbances, but none have so far been universally accepted as a definitive reason for the behavior.
In recent years, whale strandings have become more frequent around the world. In November 2018, a dead sperm whale that had washed ashore in eastern Indonesia consumed a horrifying collection of plastic trash, including 115 drinking cups, 25 plastic bags, plastic bottles, two flip-flops and a bag containing more than 1,000 pieces of string. In all, the plastic contents of the whale's stomach weighed 13.2 pound (six kilograms). The bags are black due to a reaction with the creature's stomach acids, according to Thai Whales organization. A person, on average, breathes or swallows at least 74,000 microscopic particles of plastic each year.
