A sound case for whale strandings
season without seismic testing in a long while.
More than 2000 whale strandings are historically recorded by our national museum, Te Papa. Historically, most have occurred in just four locations; Farewell Spit, Chatham Islands, Muriwai and the Mahia Peninsula.
Pilot whales are the most common species to beach en masse in this country, making up more than 90 per cent of all marine mammal strandings around our coastline. Their herd instinct is so strong that pod members will choose to stay with a stranded few.
Has the worst natural whale trap inside Farewell Spit now combined with the worst effects of man, rather seismic oil prospectors, to produce the world’s Conservation (DOC) officer commented to me that the whales seemed emaciated and in poor condition. ‘‘They look starved, completely malnourished.’’
Maybe their food source had dried up, run out of town by the seismic shocks. Fish hate seismic shocks too.
When they put in the Dry Rd around Westhaven Inlet in the late 1920s, using cart-loads of explosives, residents noticed all the fish in the inlet disappeared, coming back only after the cessation of explosive works.
Seismic testing is no different, the powerful seismic waves sent out by the likes of the world’s largest seismic testing vessel Amazon Warrior which was here last year are nothing less than massive depth charges.
This ship blasts out every 10 seconds, every hour, 24-hours a day for five months, while towing air cannons and seismic arrays kilometres in length to hunt for oil up to 4km deep in the seabed – often within a couple of kilometres of the foreshore. That ship may as well be as obnoxious as any hostile battleship in our waters.
It should be said some scientifictouted studies have shown no effects of seismic surveys on whales and dolphins but these have invariably been commissioned by the oil industry.
The majority of reputable studies now show more and more convincing evidence that marine mammals are severely affected by a continual barrage of human-made seismic shocks.
In September 2015, the United States Navy instructed its vessels to limit the use of sonar around migrating blue whales after deputations from Californians. Here in 2013, DOC implemented a code of conduct for minimising acoustic disturbance to marine mammals. But it’s not mandatory, barely considered by predatory oil prospectors bent on making bucks.
A pod of stranded whales is a heart-rending sight. Encumbered by their bulk and crush of their internal organs out of their watery habitat, they nevertheless lay without struggle or obvious panic. But their baleful eyes and distressed crooning sounds cannot help but evoke compassion.
I recall wading in knee-deep water out to one pilot whale stranding and seeing a barely 1m-long calf floundering around the legs of the rescuers in a desperate search for its mother.
Finally, it found her and started squeaking in excitement. But an attempt to feed proved impossible in the shallow water which soon turned white as mum whale did her best to squirt out milk. Both ended up dying there on the mudflats along with 90 other whales.
The last whale in New Zealand was harpooned in 1965, by the Peranos operating out of the Marlborough Sounds. Attitudes to whales and saving them has sure changed a lot since then but economics, not politics, are still the biggest driver in our society.
When I was a young cartographic trainee in the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), we were shuffled between map jobs dependent on economic fads. When the price of gold skyrocketed, we suddenly had gold exploration maps to do. When the oil shocks came, we were told to immediately shelve those gold maps and start geophysical anomaly maps, intended for use by oil prospectors.
One of my jobs became Sheet 7 Taranaki Total Force Anomalies map, an area including all of the Taranaki Bight and Tasman Sea north of Mt Egmont/Taranaki. Of course, it was too early to link the exploratory effort back then to whales strandings in Golden Bay. But I have no doubt now the two are strongly connected.
The Labour Government is quite right to call a halt to all offshore oil testing for now. Marine mammals have a right to a moratorium until the shocking effects of seismic exploration are fully determined.