High toll of whale mu ms
MOST of the whales stranded last week on the West Coast were mother sand their calves.
Scientists who visited Macquarie Harbour in the wake of Australia’s worst mass stranding said the scale of the event was“overwhelming”.
Out of 470 long-finned pilot whales that became stuck in the harbour’s shallow waters, 350 died, with the majority of those being adult females.
Tasmanian zoologists Belinda Bauer and Kirrily Moore assessed more than 250 dead whales at the site, taking tissue samples, measuring the mammals. determining their sex and assessing their reproductive states.
MOST of the whales that died after becoming stranded in Strahan’s Macquarie Harbour last week were mothers and their young, scientists from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery have determined.
Two scientists from TMAG’s zoology team travelled to the west coast to collect data from the 350 whales lost despite the massive rescue effort sparked by the stranding of 470 long-finned pilot whales in the harbour’s shallow waters.
Scientists Belinda Bauer and Kirrily Moore assessed and documented more than 250 deceased whales, taking tissue samples, measuring them, determining their sex and assessing their reproductive state.
Most of the dead whales were female, many lactating. Forty were juveniles.
“This is not unusual in pilot whale pod structure where pods have close matrilineal relationships and adult females tend to outnumber adult males. Of the 88 adult males sampled, the largest was just over six metres long ,” TMAG said.
One heavily pregnant bottlenose dolphin was also among the casualties.
Bottlenose dolphins and pilot whales are known to cohabit and forage at sea and it is most likely that this animal died in them ass stranding.
Ms Bauer and Ms Moore described the scale of the event as overwhelming and said working with many dead animals in remote locations and bad weather had been tough.
The tissue samples collected have been stored in ultra low-temperature freezers at TMAG’s Rosny Collections and Research facility to preserve the DNA.
That DNA will be available to researchers from around the world who have already expressed interest in studying th the samples.
Material has also been collected to assess the whales’ internal injuries, which may provide insights into the cause of the stranding.
“While this is undoubtedly a tragic incident, our best hope is that the data and sam-ples we collect will help provide insight into these incidents, and holding physical evidence of the event in longterm storage means we can revisit and answer questions about whale strandings with technologies that may not even exist yet ,” Ms Bauer said.