Nearly 240 pilot whales have died after becoming stranded on a remote New Zealand island. The marine mammals were lost on Pitt Island in the South Pacific, more than 800 kilometers off the east coast of New Zealand on Monday, the country’s conservation authority said on Wednesday. About 240 pilot whales died on nearby Chatham Island on Saturday.
Some of the whales were dead when they arrived, but the rest had to be euthanized to minimize suffering, said Dave Lundquist, a consultant to the agency. In the region, rescuers did not actively return marine mammals to the water “because of the risk of shark attacks on humans and the whales themselves, so euthanasia was the most humane solution.” Pitt Island is New Zealand’s most remote inhabited island, with limited communications and difficult logistics, according to the agency.
Again and again you run aground
According to the whale protection organization Project Jonah, with a total of nearly 480 whales killed in just a few days, these were major strandings in the Pacific state. “While there are large mass strandings at Farewell Spit (in the far north of the South Island of New Zealand), there are an average of 70 to 80 whales.” The helpers would try to save the animals if that was possible.
In New Zealand it happens again and again that whales get lost on the beaches. Such events are also not uncommon in the Chatham Islands, which includes Pitt Island. In 1918, more than 1,000 animals are said to have died in a single stranding.