It is a scene of horrific destruction: a stretch of pristine white sand strewn with the lifeless bodies of dozens of whales. In total, 77 carcasses lie strewn across the beach – a whole family group. Among them are young, barely a year old, adult females and a seven-metre-long adult male. Even dead, they are beautiful creatures.
The horrific row of bodies is the result of the largest mass stranding in Britain in a century – described as “heartbreaking” even by seasoned whale conservationists.
Few could remain unmoved by the scale of the tragedy, which is compounded by a further cruel twist. When the animals, a group of pilot whales, were discovered by a hiker on Wednesday [July 10] – on Tresness Beach on Sanday Island in Orkney – 12 were still alive, their tails thrashing in distress and struggling to breathe. Alarmed by the discovery, experts and conservationists rushed to the remote site, but rescue efforts were in vain.
With the whales stranded beyond the reach of the tide, there was no way to return them to the sea. And with the survivors lying on their sides, they struggled to breathe. Attempts to right them were hampered by the soft sand: no matter how hard rescuers tried to right the huge creatures, they simply collapsed again.
A difficult decision had to be made: a sniper was called in to euthanize the victims.
Nick Davison, stranding coordinator with the Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme (SMASS), described his shock when he saw the stranding – and the harsh reality of killing the survivors.
“I’ve seen a few mass strandings, but this is by far the biggest,” he says. “It just hit me when I was walking across the sand dunes and saw 77 whales – from big adult males to little calves maybe a year old or so – strewn across the beach and all dead. It’s heartbreaking, especially because this is probably an entire family group that’s been completely wiped out.
“The guys did a fantastic job trying to refloat the animals that were found alive, but they didn’t have the right equipment,” he explains. “It’s a shallow beach and these animals, especially the big males, can weigh up to two tonnes. The tide didn’t come in far enough to refloat them. So unfortunately the decision had to be made for welfare reasons. It was tough; everyone has a soft spot for cetaceans and it’s hard to go to a young pilot whale and pull the trigger. But it was the only thing we could do: put them out of their misery.”
But after the grim discovery midweek and the frantic rescue mission, the focus by Friday afternoon had shifted to a different but equally determined effort: solving the mystery of why the whales had beached themselves. Initial inspections suggest they were well-fed and in good physical condition. So, was a viral infection the cause of their confusion? Were they afraid of orcas? Did loyalty to the pod cause them to follow an ailing leader onto the sand?
Or is this, as some fear, actually a man-made disaster? Were the whales – which rely on their sensitive hearing and echolocation for communication, navigation, hunting and feeding – deafened or disoriented by the sonar, drilling or explosions in our increasingly noisy oceans?
To answer these questions, a team of experts—biologists, conservationists, pathologists, and veterinarians—has been hurled from across the United Kingdom to this remote corner of Scotland. Working against the clock, they race to measure and inspect the carcasses, and to collect and preserve samples of brain tissue, blood, skin, and blubber. The task must be completed before the tissues are broken down by the natural process of decomposition. But a greater sense of urgency also drives their work.
Almost exactly a year ago, an entire pod of 55 pilot whales died on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. And soon-to-be-published research data that The Telegraph suggests that mass strandings are becoming more common – and occurring on an increasingly large scale.
So the race is not just to find out what has happened to the whales in Orkney, but also to establish what is causing the trend and whether anything can be done to prevent further deaths.
The study is being coordinated by Dr Andrew Brownlow, director of SMASS. “If you’ve ever been on a beach and seen a mass stranding like this, it’s horrific, visceral and brutal,” he says. “We want to do everything we can to understand this – and try to prevent it from happening again.”
But after initial inspection, Davison can’t provide answers as to why the whales came ashore: “We did a thorough examination of four adult females, all of which looked in pretty good condition with nice, round bodies. We found squid remains in the youngest of the animals – so they were definitely feeding successfully until recently.”
Pilot whales are highly social animals that can live in small groups or in gigantic groups of over 1,000. They are black or dark grey and have a distinctive, curved dorsal fin. They are found in the northern Atlantic, the North Sea and the western Mediterranean and they hunt squid, mackerel and cod.
Throughout history, whales have died in mass strandings – the largest recorded in the UK in 1927 when 126 whales died in the Dornoch Firth in the Scottish Highlands. But data – soon to be published by Dr Brownlow’s research team – suggests the problem is getting worse.
Since 1992, he explains, there have been a total of 13 pilot whale strandings in Scottish waters involving three or more individuals. But the vast majority – 10 – have all occurred since 2010. “We’ve been monitoring very closely over the last 32 years,” says Dr Brownlow, “and we’ve seen two patterns that are potentially worrying in terms of mass strandings – increases in both frequency and magnitude.”
The challenge now, he explains, is to gather all the information available – from autopsies, laboratory tests and even underwater activity reports – to unravel the roots of the tragedy. “The most important thing is to understand the health of the animals, both individually and as a group, based on what we can learn from autopsies: from body condition to the presence of infectious diseases, viruses, bacteria, parasites and all physiological problems.”
The whales’ hearing may hold the key to understanding what went wrong. “This is a species that uses sound to communicate, to find food, to navigate, for all the basic life processes,” Dr. Brownlow explains, “so if there’s something wrong with their hearing or their ability to localize echoes, that could be really important. If there’s been excessive noise or prolonged amounts of noise, then cells in the hearing apparatus can get damaged: they don’t recover – and you can see that damage at necropsy.
“But the problem is that there’s a huge range of behavioural responses to noise or disturbance, both human and natural – whether it’s earthquakes or killer whales or the usual suspects like sonar, military activity, pile-driving or detonation of explosives – and not all the ways in which a socially complex animal responds to these can be detected in a post-mortem. You can’t detect whether it’s scared, whether it’s lost, whether it’s made a bad decision.”
Dr Brownlow’s team is now gathering information from as many sources as possible – “from the military, from buoys, from underwater logbooks” – to determine whether there has been a noticeable increase in noise. But while those investigations are ongoing, the stranding also presents a huge logistical problem: how to dispose of around 50 tonnes of whale carcasses.
“These animals are a really important part of the marine ecosystem and really the best thing we can do, where possible, is to bury them close to the sea,” Dr Brownlow explains. “I think the only option is to use a digger so they can be buried in the fields along the coast where they are piled up and covered with sand. They will decompose very quickly so the nutrients will go back into the marine environment.”
Once the practicalities are sorted out, Dr Brownlow and his team face a crucial task if the UK is to avoid more mass strandings in the years ahead.
“The biggest mass stranding we’ve seen in Scotland was in Lewis last year and there were 55 animals,” he says. “Now, a year later, here we are again with another case; this time 77 animals have died because they were stranded or euthanized for welfare reasons.
“The human relationship with cetaceans is very strange and very powerful,” he adds. “They are social, very complex creatures with sophisticated social structure and communication. They are clearly intelligent. I think people feel a connection with them in the same way that they do with other highly intelligent animals, like elephants and primates.
“We have to do right by these animals. We have to do something to stop this.”