March 9, 2010 • 20 mins
When whales or other aquatic mammals wash onto the shore, they are usually unable to return to the sea without help. What exactly causes a whale to beach, and how can scientists prevent it? Tune in and learn more in this episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
works dot com. Hey, this is Alison modam like, the
science editor at how staff works dot com. And this
is Robert Lamb, science writer at how stuff works dot com.
Welcome to the podcast today. You were talking about relatively
(00:25):
sad question. Actually, um, why do Wales speach themselves? Yeah?
I was fortunate enough to attend a lecture recently at
the Georgia Aquarium here in Atlanta, hosted by Dr Gregory D. Bossart,
who is their chief Fetinary Officer senior vice president and
his special this is his specialty dealing with with the
(00:46):
question of why be Wales beach themselves? And uh, he's
involved in a number of rescue and rehabilitation UM programs
as well. And it's it's really, yeah, a much deeper
question than you might think. It's not like on par
with pointed boat it wash up on the shore. Yeah,
I mean we've all seen the news story. What were
you saying about. You know, if a news organization had
(01:08):
a choice between a beach whale or a car chase,
it would be tough to just which. I mean, like
if if you return on Fox News and they had
to choose between like a you know O. J. Simpson
style car chase and a beach whale. I mean in
terms of like sensational stories that you can cover by helicopter,
those are two of the big ones, you know, because
instantly you have this this poor you know, um aquatic
(01:30):
mammal that we can all sort of empathize with on
some level, you know, stranded, helpless, and then all these
these well meaning but ultimately kind of clueless people, um
in many cases except for the actual marine biologists you know,
on the scene, you know, trying to help the animal,
you know, push it back out the sea or or
or or you know, daused with water to keep it
from overheating. Um. You know, this massive effort to save it. Right.
(01:54):
It's a media circuits. But it's sad. It's sad. Although
I will add, as you mentioned that sometimes on thats
do succeed in saving some of the marine mammals that
are stranded you know by right. Yeah, sometimes it is
um a situation where they can just push the animal
right back out to sea and it's fine. Um. Other
times you push the animal out, get it back in
(02:14):
the water, and then it just ends up right back
on the beach, right but we'll talk about that in
the sec Yeah. So, but that's the thing. It's a
lot more complicated than just oh, it's back in the sea.
You know. Oh it's a heavy way. We can't push
it it. It's more involved. Okay, Sue, what is stranding beaching?
It's pretty simple. It's when you see an animal that
swimming or floating into shore and it gets stuck in
(02:35):
the shallow waters. And we tend to think of animals
like whales or dolphins running into this kind of problem,
but actually it does happen to sea turtles, to and seals,
and it's a big problem because you know, shallow water
isn't their natural environment, and uh, if they actually come
onto the beach, they're they're probably going to die without
some sort of rescue effort. And how do they die.
(02:56):
They end up overheating for starters, they need water who
cool them? Right? And they're kind of prey for any predators.
You know, if you're a whale and you're washed up
on some Arctic shore and a poldar bearrar comes along, Um,
you know, it's pretty much a foregone conclusion what's going
to happen. Also, again, these animals are made to live
(03:17):
in an ocean environment, so like their their weight distribution
is all out of black if they're on the land.
There are some some types of of whales that when
they when they're washed ashore like that, their muscles end
up atrophying on one side of their body and it
actually causes the spine to to curve. So yeah, it's
just a bad situation all around. So, like I said,
(03:40):
it's mostly the cetaceans Um, the order that includes aquatic
mostly marine mammals like your whales, your dolphins or purposes um.
The bottle nose dolphin like flipper or whatever you think
of when you think of that kind of dolphin is
the most commonly streaded species. You look through the database
on some of the organizations that deal with this issue,
it's just bottlenose dolphins upon bottlenes dolphins, and part of
(04:01):
that say they tend to live closer into shore, but
that the number two species is actually the pygmy sperm
whale CONSTI live in deeper waters. So yeah, and that
actually leads me into the single stranding. So you have
to kind of strandings. You're you're gonna have a loan
individual or maybe an individual with offspring, or you're gonna
have these mass strandings kind of like the Jim Jones
(04:24):
cool a type of debacle. UM, But a single stranding
is pretty straightforward. And this is just going to be
when a sick animal beaches itself and the sickness could
be parasites, it could be disease, it could be um
ingestion of like a biotoxin, or it could be something
you know, like it ran into a ship or something
screwed up neurologically with the animal um and it can't
(04:46):
really navigate winds up on the shore. Yeah. And interestingly,
with the pitch me sperm whales that you were just
talking about, they're kind of this funky, mysterious species and um,
the deal with them is that they're actually suffering from
heart disease and so by the time they wash up
on shore, they're basically dying the slow death due to
(05:07):
heart failure, which is I'm sorry, it's kind of dismal.
I hope you guys otherwise have had a good day,
but this is a bit of a grim topic. So UM,
and then in the case of sick whales, you're also
going to have um caps who follow their their moms,
and they're hugely dependent on their moms for the first
two years of their life, especially with dolphins. So um,
if a mom has you know, some sort of sickness
(05:28):
or injury or neurological impairment, then they're both going to
strand themselves on shore. So that's kind of the single stranding,
that's the that's the you know, the solo instance. But
then you have these crazy mass strandings. Yeah, and some
of these range from you know, it could you could
be talking like a dozen whales that have washed up
on the shore or and this just blows my mind,
(05:50):
but New Zealand a thousand whales washed up on the shore.
A thousand you know, it's crazy just to pop elliptic sounding,
you know. And yes, so we're talking a lot of animals.
And the weird thing is that while single strandings tend
to involve animals that are sick or injured, animals that
(06:11):
are dying in the final stages of their life, mass
strandings will often include perfectly healthy animals that they're just
you know, washed up on the shore. Dr Bosser actually
told an interesting story about an incident he was present
for it in which sixty four dolphins washed upon the shore,
and um, some well meaning but otherwise, you know, untrained
(06:34):
individuals from the area were on the scene, and so
they did what might come seem natural to most of us.
They started pushing the animals back out to sea. Absolutely,
I would totally do that. So start pushing you know,
all sixty four, you know, right out back into the water.
And then what do they do? They wash up all
of them again, just a little waist down the beach.
This is there's a lot of mystery that still remains revolving,
(06:55):
revolving around um these mass beachings. But the dominant theory
is that they believe that there will be a particular
leader dolphin, all right, and that leader something goes wrong,
either it's an illness or something neurological, and they end
up going going ashore and the others simply follow. So
if you push them all back out, you know, they're
(07:17):
just all going to follow the same leader back up
onto the beach. So like in this particular case, they
ended up having to euthanize most of the whales, you know,
all but just a few, right, because I suppose they
can't elect a leader on the spot or anything like
that right. Yeah, there's just and you're you're doing with
limited time, limited resources that they can't you know, stay
out of the water indefinitely. It's it's a really heartbreaking situation.
(07:39):
So let's talk about some of the other reasons beaching occurs,
mainly the ones that we have a hand in, um
like environmental climate change. Yeah, this is a big one,
um Like. An interesting example of this is when say,
a hooded seal washes up um in Florida. Hooded seal
is an Arctic animal. What does an Arctic seal to
(08:00):
going in Florida exactly? You know, and and they believe
it has to do with well, there were two seals
in this particular instance. Maybe it's a snowbird seal, you know,
like the snowbirds they call old elderly people who hang
out and you have cold spots during the summer and
they migrate to But no, it's not that, No, well,
I mean they did come to Florida to die, I guess,
(08:21):
oh gosh. It was also they had bellies full of
garbage because they had basically they were they were having
to go further south um to try and uh and
find food. Um. And and this all has to do
with with something called environmental distress syndrome. In a nutshell,
(08:41):
it comes down to this, if any kind of environmental
change going on, and and the belief is that that
humans have at least a hand in this, you know,
and I'll leave everyone else to argue about that, but
but you're changing the recipe for life on Earth, and
it has at least a little bit and it can
have you know, medications for the animal's healthy Okay, yeah,
(09:05):
so yeah, so suddenly and animals having to go a
little further south or it's it's leading to you know,
it's leading to the emergence of new diseases, which is
which comes into play with for instance, the pygmy sperm whales. Um.
You know, they all have this heart disease. And there's
a theory that this may be linked to environmental distress syndrome.
(09:26):
The environment is changing, it's creating new diseases are emerging.
All diseases are re emerging. Um, everything's thrown into a
state of flux. You know, all the dice have been
rolled and they're they're coming around to a different arrangement. Yeah.
And on a related environmental note, I actually read this
study about chloride ion concentration in the water, and so
chloride ions um are handy for preventing barnacle growth on
(09:49):
your boat. But as it happens, they also affector into
your sense of hearing. And if you mess with a
number of chloride ions and you can mess with your hearing.
So researchers have positive that this is one way that
we're messing with cetation hearing. Another interesting theory has to
do actually with sound. Obviously, the ocean is is filled
(10:09):
with various noises and a number of these uh I mean,
these these whales and dolphins use sound in something called
um echolocation. It's basically sonar, all right, So when you
start introducing new sounds, you know that that everything has
not evolved to deal with UM. Take for instance, noise
generated by oil rigs. UM. You can end up throwing
(10:32):
this sense of this, this this navigational sense off all right. Right.
You can even have noise from you know, giant ships
trawling disease. And of particular interest, the U. S. Navy
is currently funding research into this because they might be
the ones to blame UM. There's a belief that that
sonars sonar used in the submarine detection training exercises. Um,
(10:54):
maybe aggravating gas bubbles in the whales livers, which it
is unpleasant, yeah, which can actually result in decompression sickness. Um.
So that's another sound related possibility that could be leading
to a number of these like mass strandings. So interviewers
basically with the animal's ability to communicate and thus right, yeah,
(11:16):
throws off their compass and then they wind up on
the shore and again you know, they go back out.
You know, it's not going to do any good. So
says someone notices a beach animal in the Sharan reports
and you the marine biologists or whoever response to it, like,
what are the options on the table? Well, um, sadly,
I mean in many of these cases it ends up
being used in Asia, you know, um, you know you
(11:39):
have you know, even just like a hundred, much less
say a thousand animals wash up on the beach. You know,
if everybody you know committed themselves to the cause of
saving these s wales, you wouldn't be able to do it. Um.
So you gotta you know, you gotta pick and choose,
and that means trying to determine which ones are the
healthiest specimens that can either you know, you can either
release or take back for rehabilitation. Impossible rerelease, and you
(12:02):
can do that with like performing tooth extractions. They'll perform
a tooth extraction on site to see you can instantly
tell how all the the animal in question is. Yeah,
and obvious signs of like you know, disease age, you know,
if they're covered with you know, scars from um, you know,
altercations with sharks, etcetera. I also read that they can
they're developing a device that can test the animals hearing
(12:26):
on site. So if they're hearing is messed up, it's
obviously such a key sense and that might be an
indicator of how the animal fair back in the wild
or in rehabilitation. And then you can also push them
out to see and on occasions it does work, more
often it doesn't. Yeah, I mean a big thing is
one of their beach they have to just keeping them
cool to you know, like keeping water on them, um
(12:49):
and you know, keeping them from eating up too much. Uh.
Interesting that when they die, it's not necessary. It's not
a lost cause because a lot of what we know
about what's wrong with these beached whales comes through performing
utopsies net weather with an animal. It's called a good point.
But but yeah, they'll the in fact, they have like
(13:12):
trailers like necropsy necropsy trailers that they can just perform
the autopsy on site. Sometimes they'll bring them in um
and have them you know, you know, and and take
care of them, you know, in a situation where they
have a little more time. Um. And then there's rehabilitation,
of course. Yeah. And this is a big one. This
is um. Yeah, and this is you know exactly what
(13:32):
it sounds like. You bring them in, uh, you work on,
you know, addressing whatever the physical ailment is, and then
try and get them back into shape to reintroduce them
in the wild. Um. And this it's trickier than it sounds. Yeah,
because you bring them in, you're then you're feeding them
dead fish. Yeah. And they need to, you have to,
they have to relearn how to eat live fish. Right.
(13:54):
So I think one of the most famous examples of
rehabilitation that perhaps didn't go so well was with Willie.
Oh yeah, yeah, I would say this one did not
go well at all. For those of you're not familiar,
I actually never saw the movie. I didn't see the
movie in there, I can't picture the whale. Yeah, it's
like jumping over some rocks and there's like a child
involved killer well right free daily as a killer roll. Yeah,
(14:15):
and so yeah, the whale in the movie like gets
to go free. And then people were like, hey, we
want the real whale to go free. That's not fair
that this whale played a free whale and it's a
captive whale or whatever, right right, right, So that makes
sense on a on a basic level. Yeah, but the
thing is that they can't They normally cannot release a
whale back into the wild unless it is physically and
mentally able um to survive in the wild. Remember, these
(14:36):
are very social animals, so it's not like it just
needs to it's it. It needs a it needs to
know how to find food. But it also needs to
be able to get along with other killer whales. It
needs to join a you know, a pot of killer
whales and thrive. So it needs to be accepted by
those whales. Um. So this was it has some stigma
attached shit. And so yeah, following all the public clamor
(14:58):
over this, uh, they ended up for leasing the whale,
whose name is Kiko. I believe it's k e I
k O pronounced it how you will. But yeah, so
people clamored. They ended up saying, all right, they released
the poor guy. And Bossert himself was a was a
critic of releasing this animal. And he described what because
(15:20):
it wasn't ready to be really, he was the animal
wasn't ready to be rereleased into the wild. And he
said it was like basically like a gold big golden retriever.
Like all this animal wanted to do was come up
to a human, open its mouth and have the human
scratch its tongue, which is no, that's what's what Apparently
they like to have their tongue scratch. But that's all
well and good in the confines of like a sea
(15:40):
world environment or something, you know, but out in the wild,
scratch it right. And and it's important to realize that
the ocean is a dangerous, dangerous, harsh place, you know.
I mean it's it's most of the earth, you know,
and uh and and it's it's deadly. So if you
if this whale is going out there, it's it's like
if you release somebody from uh um, you know, some
(16:01):
sort of I don't know, I'm a magic school house
and they went out thinking the world is all sunshines
and wallet inspectors, and you know, you know, the animals
just not prepared for the real world anymore. So this
animal ended up going back into the wild, wasn't accepted
by any any other killer whales, and end up dying
alone in Iceland. That's proper. That is really sad. Um. Well,
(16:25):
part of the other problem is is actually a little
bit more basic. It's it's a lack of funding. So
we have all these agencies right now that will respond
to UM a report of a marine mammal stranding, and
you can find them if you head on over to Noah,
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and they have a
division that deals with this exclusively. But anyway, UM, you
have all these agencies that are you know, prepared to respond,
(16:48):
but you don't have enough funding. So then it becomes
a question of how how is that money best spent,
Because if you're talking about a dolphin, it can cost
as much as a hundred seventy thousand dollars to rehab
a single dolphin. UM for something like a seal, a
sea lion, or a walrus, maybe it's a little cheaper,
maybe you get four dollars, maybe get fifty dollars. It's
(17:08):
a huge range, um, But this is the kind of
funding that they were talking about in uh the online
magazine for woods Hole they were they wrote an article
dealing with this. I mean, yeah, and it comes down
to is is it worth the money? Is it worth
the time? I mean, in many cases, you know, through
(17:28):
rehabilitation we learn more about the animals. There's and there's
a lot to be said for that. But take the
case of C six, which was a forty year old dolphin.
Forty years that's an old dolphin, all right, just covered
with scars from from altercations with with bull sharks. All right,
This is you know, a rug rugged, rough animal washes up,
all right, undergoes four months of rebuility, rehabilitation. Really they
(17:51):
finally released the animal back into the wild. Ninety three
days later, he chokes on a fish an invasive species
um by the way, but but ends up choking on
a fish and dies. So I mean the big ethical
question is in what in which cases are we saving
the animal more for us than for the animal's own good,
(18:13):
you know, I mean absolutely selfishly, I can say if
I were in that situation of looking at a dying
animal on the beach, I would make every effort to
preserve the life if I could, you know, if it
involves like pushing some poor dolphin back into the ocean,
and then but is that the right response? Not necessarily
because I mean the free Willy example, there's an example
(18:34):
of them in the best of intentions there people just
wanted a whale to be free. But you know if
I think that was the case where it was ultimately
more about what we wanted than what was good for
the whale. And you know, in most of these an
a lot of these animals, especially in the single beachings,
I mean, they're dying. This is a dying animal. You know,
it's kind of you've got to close the book sometimes.
(18:55):
But there's not really no there's not really any right
or wrong answer here. It's just more of an ethical
quandram so on that uplifting note. If you have any
questions about marine mammal strandings, shoot us an email at
science Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or in
the meantime, you can check out some articles like what
Happens when a Whale Dies by Christine Conger and we
got blogs you wrote about this on the run. Yeah,
(19:17):
actually I covered this initially on the blogs a couple
of posts on whales, So yeah, I come check check
out the blogs and see what what kind of topics
are fresh in our minds. For more on this and
thousands of other topics, is a how stuff works dot Com.
(19:38):
Want more how stuff works, check out our blogs on
the house stuff works dot com home page.
Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
works dot com. Hey, this is Alison modam like, the
science editor at how staff works dot com. And this
is Robert Lamb, science writer at how stuff works dot com.
Welcome to the podcast today. You were talking about relatively
(00:25):
sad question. Actually, um, why do Wales speach themselves? Yeah?
I was fortunate enough to attend a lecture recently at
the Georgia Aquarium here in Atlanta, hosted by Dr Gregory D. Bossart,
who is their chief Fetinary Officer senior vice president and
his special this is his specialty dealing with with the
(00:46):
question of why be Wales beach themselves? And uh, he's
involved in a number of rescue and rehabilitation UM programs
as well. And it's it's really, yeah, a much deeper
question than you might think. It's not like on par
with pointed boat it wash up on the shore. Yeah,
I mean we've all seen the news story. What were
you saying about. You know, if a news organization had
(01:08):
a choice between a beach whale or a car chase,
it would be tough to just which. I mean, like
if if you return on Fox News and they had
to choose between like a you know O. J. Simpson
style car chase and a beach whale. I mean in
terms of like sensational stories that you can cover by helicopter,
those are two of the big ones, you know, because
instantly you have this this poor you know, um aquatic
(01:30):
mammal that we can all sort of empathize with on
some level, you know, stranded, helpless, and then all these
these well meaning but ultimately kind of clueless people, um
in many cases except for the actual marine biologists you know,
on the scene, you know, trying to help the animal,
you know, push it back out the sea or or
or or you know, daused with water to keep it
from overheating. Um. You know, this massive effort to save it. Right.
(01:54):
It's a media circuits. But it's sad. It's sad. Although
I will add, as you mentioned that sometimes on thats
do succeed in saving some of the marine mammals that
are stranded you know by right. Yeah, sometimes it is
um a situation where they can just push the animal
right back out to sea and it's fine. Um. Other
times you push the animal out, get it back in
(02:14):
the water, and then it just ends up right back
on the beach, right but we'll talk about that in
the sec Yeah. So, but that's the thing. It's a
lot more complicated than just oh, it's back in the sea.
You know. Oh it's a heavy way. We can't push
it it. It's more involved. Okay, Sue, what is stranding beaching?
It's pretty simple. It's when you see an animal that
swimming or floating into shore and it gets stuck in
(02:35):
the shallow waters. And we tend to think of animals
like whales or dolphins running into this kind of problem,
but actually it does happen to sea turtles, to and seals,
and it's a big problem because you know, shallow water
isn't their natural environment, and uh, if they actually come
onto the beach, they're they're probably going to die without
some sort of rescue effort. And how do they die.
(02:56):
They end up overheating for starters, they need water who
cool them? Right? And they're kind of prey for any predators.
You know, if you're a whale and you're washed up
on some Arctic shore and a poldar bearrar comes along, Um,
you know, it's pretty much a foregone conclusion what's going
to happen. Also, again, these animals are made to live
(03:17):
in an ocean environment, so like their their weight distribution
is all out of black if they're on the land.
There are some some types of of whales that when
they when they're washed ashore like that, their muscles end
up atrophying on one side of their body and it
actually causes the spine to to curve. So yeah, it's
just a bad situation all around. So, like I said,
(03:40):
it's mostly the cetaceans Um, the order that includes aquatic
mostly marine mammals like your whales, your dolphins or purposes um.
The bottle nose dolphin like flipper or whatever you think
of when you think of that kind of dolphin is
the most commonly streaded species. You look through the database
on some of the organizations that deal with this issue,
it's just bottlenose dolphins upon bottlenes dolphins, and part of
(04:01):
that say they tend to live closer into shore, but
that the number two species is actually the pygmy sperm
whale CONSTI live in deeper waters. So yeah, and that
actually leads me into the single stranding. So you have
to kind of strandings. You're you're gonna have a loan
individual or maybe an individual with offspring, or you're gonna
have these mass strandings kind of like the Jim Jones
(04:24):
cool a type of debacle. UM, But a single stranding
is pretty straightforward. And this is just going to be
when a sick animal beaches itself and the sickness could
be parasites, it could be disease, it could be um
ingestion of like a biotoxin, or it could be something
you know, like it ran into a ship or something
screwed up neurologically with the animal um and it can't
(04:46):
really navigate winds up on the shore. Yeah. And interestingly,
with the pitch me sperm whales that you were just
talking about, they're kind of this funky, mysterious species and um,
the deal with them is that they're actually suffering from
heart disease and so by the time they wash up
on shore, they're basically dying the slow death due to
(05:07):
heart failure, which is I'm sorry, it's kind of dismal.
I hope you guys otherwise have had a good day,
but this is a bit of a grim topic. So UM,
and then in the case of sick whales, you're also
going to have um caps who follow their their moms,
and they're hugely dependent on their moms for the first
two years of their life, especially with dolphins. So um,
if a mom has you know, some sort of sickness
(05:28):
or injury or neurological impairment, then they're both going to
strand themselves on shore. So that's kind of the single stranding,
that's the that's the you know, the solo instance. But
then you have these crazy mass strandings. Yeah, and some
of these range from you know, it could you could
be talking like a dozen whales that have washed up
on the shore or and this just blows my mind,
(05:50):
but New Zealand a thousand whales washed up on the shore.
A thousand you know, it's crazy just to pop elliptic sounding,
you know. And yes, so we're talking a lot of animals.
And the weird thing is that while single strandings tend
to involve animals that are sick or injured, animals that
(06:11):
are dying in the final stages of their life, mass
strandings will often include perfectly healthy animals that they're just
you know, washed up on the shore. Dr Bosser actually
told an interesting story about an incident he was present
for it in which sixty four dolphins washed upon the shore,
and um, some well meaning but otherwise, you know, untrained
(06:34):
individuals from the area were on the scene, and so
they did what might come seem natural to most of us.
They started pushing the animals back out to sea. Absolutely,
I would totally do that. So start pushing you know,
all sixty four, you know, right out back into the water.
And then what do they do? They wash up all
of them again, just a little waist down the beach.
This is there's a lot of mystery that still remains revolving,
(06:55):
revolving around um these mass beachings. But the dominant theory
is that they believe that there will be a particular
leader dolphin, all right, and that leader something goes wrong,
either it's an illness or something neurological, and they end
up going going ashore and the others simply follow. So
if you push them all back out, you know, they're
(07:17):
just all going to follow the same leader back up
onto the beach. So like in this particular case, they
ended up having to euthanize most of the whales, you know,
all but just a few, right, because I suppose they
can't elect a leader on the spot or anything like
that right. Yeah, there's just and you're you're doing with
limited time, limited resources that they can't you know, stay
out of the water indefinitely. It's it's a really heartbreaking situation.
(07:39):
So let's talk about some of the other reasons beaching occurs,
mainly the ones that we have a hand in, um
like environmental climate change. Yeah, this is a big one,
um Like. An interesting example of this is when say,
a hooded seal washes up um in Florida. Hooded seal
is an Arctic animal. What does an Arctic seal to
(08:00):
going in Florida exactly? You know, and and they believe
it has to do with well, there were two seals
in this particular instance. Maybe it's a snowbird seal, you know,
like the snowbirds they call old elderly people who hang
out and you have cold spots during the summer and
they migrate to But no, it's not that, No, well,
I mean they did come to Florida to die, I guess,
(08:21):
oh gosh. It was also they had bellies full of
garbage because they had basically they were they were having
to go further south um to try and uh and
find food. Um. And and this all has to do
with with something called environmental distress syndrome. In a nutshell,
(08:41):
it comes down to this, if any kind of environmental
change going on, and and the belief is that that
humans have at least a hand in this, you know,
and I'll leave everyone else to argue about that, but
but you're changing the recipe for life on Earth, and
it has at least a little bit and it can
have you know, medications for the animal's healthy Okay, yeah,
(09:05):
so yeah, so suddenly and animals having to go a
little further south or it's it's leading to you know,
it's leading to the emergence of new diseases, which is
which comes into play with for instance, the pygmy sperm whales. Um.
You know, they all have this heart disease. And there's
a theory that this may be linked to environmental distress syndrome.
(09:26):
The environment is changing, it's creating new diseases are emerging.
All diseases are re emerging. Um, everything's thrown into a
state of flux. You know, all the dice have been
rolled and they're they're coming around to a different arrangement. Yeah.
And on a related environmental note, I actually read this
study about chloride ion concentration in the water, and so
chloride ions um are handy for preventing barnacle growth on
(09:49):
your boat. But as it happens, they also affector into
your sense of hearing. And if you mess with a
number of chloride ions and you can mess with your hearing.
So researchers have positive that this is one way that
we're messing with cetation hearing. Another interesting theory has to
do actually with sound. Obviously, the ocean is is filled
(10:09):
with various noises and a number of these uh I mean,
these these whales and dolphins use sound in something called
um echolocation. It's basically sonar, all right, So when you
start introducing new sounds, you know that that everything has
not evolved to deal with UM. Take for instance, noise
generated by oil rigs. UM. You can end up throwing
(10:32):
this sense of this, this this navigational sense off all right. Right.
You can even have noise from you know, giant ships
trawling disease. And of particular interest, the U. S. Navy
is currently funding research into this because they might be
the ones to blame UM. There's a belief that that
sonars sonar used in the submarine detection training exercises. Um,
(10:54):
maybe aggravating gas bubbles in the whales livers, which it
is unpleasant, yeah, which can actually result in decompression sickness. Um.
So that's another sound related possibility that could be leading
to a number of these like mass strandings. So interviewers
basically with the animal's ability to communicate and thus right, yeah,
(11:16):
throws off their compass and then they wind up on
the shore and again you know, they go back out.
You know, it's not going to do any good. So
says someone notices a beach animal in the Sharan reports
and you the marine biologists or whoever response to it, like,
what are the options on the table? Well, um, sadly,
I mean in many of these cases it ends up
being used in Asia, you know, um, you know you
(11:39):
have you know, even just like a hundred, much less
say a thousand animals wash up on the beach. You know,
if everybody you know committed themselves to the cause of
saving these s wales, you wouldn't be able to do it. Um.
So you gotta you know, you gotta pick and choose,
and that means trying to determine which ones are the
healthiest specimens that can either you know, you can either
release or take back for rehabilitation. Impossible rerelease, and you
(12:02):
can do that with like performing tooth extractions. They'll perform
a tooth extraction on site to see you can instantly
tell how all the the animal in question is. Yeah,
and obvious signs of like you know, disease age, you know,
if they're covered with you know, scars from um, you know,
altercations with sharks, etcetera. I also read that they can
they're developing a device that can test the animals hearing
(12:26):
on site. So if they're hearing is messed up, it's
obviously such a key sense and that might be an
indicator of how the animal fair back in the wild
or in rehabilitation. And then you can also push them
out to see and on occasions it does work, more
often it doesn't. Yeah, I mean a big thing is
one of their beach they have to just keeping them
cool to you know, like keeping water on them, um
(12:49):
and you know, keeping them from eating up too much. Uh.
Interesting that when they die, it's not necessary. It's not
a lost cause because a lot of what we know
about what's wrong with these beached whales comes through performing
utopsies net weather with an animal. It's called a good point.
But but yeah, they'll the in fact, they have like
(13:12):
trailers like necropsy necropsy trailers that they can just perform
the autopsy on site. Sometimes they'll bring them in um
and have them you know, you know, and and take
care of them, you know, in a situation where they
have a little more time. Um. And then there's rehabilitation,
of course. Yeah. And this is a big one. This
is um. Yeah, and this is you know exactly what
(13:32):
it sounds like. You bring them in, uh, you work on,
you know, addressing whatever the physical ailment is, and then
try and get them back into shape to reintroduce them
in the wild. Um. And this it's trickier than it sounds. Yeah,
because you bring them in, you're then you're feeding them
dead fish. Yeah. And they need to, you have to,
they have to relearn how to eat live fish. Right.
(13:54):
So I think one of the most famous examples of
rehabilitation that perhaps didn't go so well was with Willie.
Oh yeah, yeah, I would say this one did not
go well at all. For those of you're not familiar,
I actually never saw the movie. I didn't see the
movie in there, I can't picture the whale. Yeah, it's
like jumping over some rocks and there's like a child
involved killer well right free daily as a killer roll. Yeah,
(14:15):
and so yeah, the whale in the movie like gets
to go free. And then people were like, hey, we
want the real whale to go free. That's not fair
that this whale played a free whale and it's a
captive whale or whatever, right right, right, So that makes
sense on a on a basic level. Yeah, but the
thing is that they can't They normally cannot release a
whale back into the wild unless it is physically and
mentally able um to survive in the wild. Remember, these
(14:36):
are very social animals, so it's not like it just
needs to it's it. It needs a it needs to
know how to find food. But it also needs to
be able to get along with other killer whales. It
needs to join a you know, a pot of killer
whales and thrive. So it needs to be accepted by
those whales. Um. So this was it has some stigma
attached shit. And so yeah, following all the public clamor
(14:58):
over this, uh, they ended up for leasing the whale,
whose name is Kiko. I believe it's k e I
k O pronounced it how you will. But yeah, so
people clamored. They ended up saying, all right, they released
the poor guy. And Bossert himself was a was a
critic of releasing this animal. And he described what because
(15:20):
it wasn't ready to be really, he was the animal
wasn't ready to be rereleased into the wild. And he
said it was like basically like a gold big golden retriever.
Like all this animal wanted to do was come up
to a human, open its mouth and have the human
scratch its tongue, which is no, that's what's what Apparently
they like to have their tongue scratch. But that's all
well and good in the confines of like a sea
(15:40):
world environment or something, you know, but out in the wild,
scratch it right. And and it's important to realize that
the ocean is a dangerous, dangerous, harsh place, you know.
I mean it's it's most of the earth, you know,
and uh and and it's it's deadly. So if you
if this whale is going out there, it's it's like
if you release somebody from uh um, you know, some
(16:01):
sort of I don't know, I'm a magic school house
and they went out thinking the world is all sunshines
and wallet inspectors, and you know, you know, the animals
just not prepared for the real world anymore. So this
animal ended up going back into the wild, wasn't accepted
by any any other killer whales, and end up dying
alone in Iceland. That's proper. That is really sad. Um. Well,
(16:25):
part of the other problem is is actually a little
bit more basic. It's it's a lack of funding. So
we have all these agencies right now that will respond
to UM a report of a marine mammal stranding, and
you can find them if you head on over to Noah,
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and they have a
division that deals with this exclusively. But anyway, UM, you
have all these agencies that are you know, prepared to respond,
(16:48):
but you don't have enough funding. So then it becomes
a question of how how is that money best spent,
Because if you're talking about a dolphin, it can cost
as much as a hundred seventy thousand dollars to rehab
a single dolphin. UM for something like a seal, a
sea lion, or a walrus, maybe it's a little cheaper,
maybe you get four dollars, maybe get fifty dollars. It's
(17:08):
a huge range, um, But this is the kind of
funding that they were talking about in uh the online
magazine for woods Hole they were they wrote an article
dealing with this. I mean, yeah, and it comes down
to is is it worth the money? Is it worth
the time? I mean, in many cases, you know, through
(17:28):
rehabilitation we learn more about the animals. There's and there's
a lot to be said for that. But take the
case of C six, which was a forty year old dolphin.
Forty years that's an old dolphin, all right, just covered
with scars from from altercations with with bull sharks. All right,
This is you know, a rug rugged, rough animal washes up,
all right, undergoes four months of rebuility, rehabilitation. Really they
(17:51):
finally released the animal back into the wild. Ninety three
days later, he chokes on a fish an invasive species
um by the way, but but ends up choking on
a fish and dies. So I mean the big ethical
question is in what in which cases are we saving
the animal more for us than for the animal's own good,
(18:13):
you know, I mean absolutely selfishly, I can say if
I were in that situation of looking at a dying
animal on the beach, I would make every effort to
preserve the life if I could, you know, if it
involves like pushing some poor dolphin back into the ocean,
and then but is that the right response? Not necessarily
because I mean the free Willy example, there's an example
(18:34):
of them in the best of intentions there people just
wanted a whale to be free. But you know if
I think that was the case where it was ultimately
more about what we wanted than what was good for
the whale. And you know, in most of these an
a lot of these animals, especially in the single beachings,
I mean, they're dying. This is a dying animal. You know,
it's kind of you've got to close the book sometimes.
(18:55):
But there's not really no there's not really any right
or wrong answer here. It's just more of an ethical
quandram so on that uplifting note. If you have any
questions about marine mammal strandings, shoot us an email at
science Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or in
the meantime, you can check out some articles like what
Happens when a Whale Dies by Christine Conger and we
got blogs you wrote about this on the run. Yeah,
(19:17):
actually I covered this initially on the blogs a couple
of posts on whales, So yeah, I come check check
out the blogs and see what what kind of topics
are fresh in our minds. For more on this and
thousands of other topics, is a how stuff works dot Com.
(19:38):
Want more how stuff works, check out our blogs on
the house stuff works dot com home page.
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