Whale Stranding in New Zealand

 

Part I – Don’t panic, and stay away from the tail.

 

I woke up feeling dehydrated, with one of those headaches that only goes away if you can get back to sleep. I was in a tent with wool blankets pulled over my head. I could smell the septic pond already. Why had we camped next to the septic? Oh yeah, we were anti-social and it was the only spot with no one else ‘living’ in it. We were like Canadian pioneers, moving to shitty places because it was the only land left for the taking. It was supposed to be a rock climbing day, we were in the north western tip of the south island of New Zealand because there was a fantastic crop of limestone cliffs, but that day my tips were raw, my hands were stuck into half-cocked fists, I guess claws is the word, and they were not responding to commands. All I needed to do was sleep some more, and pee, and drink more water. I was hungover. Troy, the camp master, was outside talking to the girls, who must have been drinking tea judging from the period of their banter.

 

Are you guys traveling with wet suits?  Troy asked.

Yeah, why?

There is a mass whale stranding out at The Spit and they need volunteers with wetsuits.

 

When we arrived at the end of the dirt road there was already a field of cars, campervans, and hippy buses. If there weren’t a neon-orange road-sign reading whale stranding you would have thought it was a psytrance festival. We followed the indications of the man whose job it was to point toward an empty patch of the paddock turned parking lot. We quickly adorned our wet suits and walked to the beach entrance where a crowd of people gathered.

 

 

A tall man in a blue vest stood in front of a tow-behind trailer, where he was repeating instructions and updates. A bold print banner hung behind him on the trailer outlining how to care for a beached whale, what to do and what not to do. There were many and intricate instructions, some meant to save whales, others meant to save humans. I skimmed them, nothing surprising, keep them wet, don’t panic, and stay away from the tail.

 

It was mid morning and we were not in the early group of volunteers; by the looks of the cars pouring in we were with the main wave of arrivals. From what I could gather there were two organizing bodies, the New Zealand Department of Conservation, which is the governmental arm that manages the land where the stranding occurred, and Project Jonah, a registered charity focused on marine mammal conservation whose main focus is to train what they call ‘marine mammal medics’. The tall man was the Project Jonah coordinator and he had clearly done this before. The whales are a few kilometers down the beach, he was explaining in a tone not unlike a home answering machine. We are not letting people walk down the beach at this time because the tide is up and we need the remaining beach to allow room for the utility vehicles and for emergency access.  There are hundreds of stranded whales, he continued, his voice with an edge of plea. Many have already died, many still need help, the tide is up and we don’t need people now, but later when the tide recedes people will be needed to care for the whales that don’t swim away. Right now we need everyone to just hang tight.

 

People didn’t like being told to hang tight, it was like being told to stand in line, or do as you’re told. People have grammar school flashbacks and get anxious. I settled into a seat of tuft under a skinny tree and scanned the faces. A man in a velvet green cape and a dreadlock goatee walked up and smiled at me. He had one tooth stained the color of tobacco tar. I tried not to look horrified and nodded with my chin. Beyond him there were several mostly naked and wild looking kids sword fighting with invisible sticks. I wondered why they didn’t get real sticks, or why their parents didn’t make them wear pants. I looked for their mother in the crowd. A few braless oversized women in slack cotton shirts were possible matches. One woman had weeds braided into her hair and mud caked high up her exposed legs. She wasn’t wearing shoes. Many people in the crowd didn’t bother to bring shoes; I wasn’t wearing shoes. An old man in the back of the pack suddenly asked loudly if he could walk down the beach. His nose pinched his face and grey tufts of beard hair coiled into three distinct cones, each a horn devoted to differing directions of gravity. Because he repeated himself for a living, or because the appearance of senility tends to make us act especially deferential, the tall man directing the crowd kindly explained that they needed the beach clear for now, but that maybe in a while more volunteers would be needed.

 

After some time a call for 20 people in wet suits went out and we were ushered onto an off-road beach-bus and sent down the beach. As we arrived we could see the animals washed up to the high tide line and half sunk in the receding water. A crowd of people had gathered on the beach in various postures, some stood, looking out toward the main group of whales 200 meters off the beach, some sat on picnic blankets eating lunches and drinking tea from thermoses. There were kids walking about and playing among the carcasses, which numbered at least 300 and stretched down the beach past the people as far as you could see. Some people were crying and in various postures of shock. Some were excited and hyper-focused on the task at hand. Some people must have been compartmentalizing the horror as they seemed not to notice the bodies and were carrying on with their picnics, as though if it weren’t for the masses of rotting whale it was a fine day at the beach.

 

 

The wet suited volunteers, fresh off the bus, were briefed by a DOC coordinator who repeated much of the same points as the tall man: stay calm and stay away from the tails. We were gathered together and sent out into the water, dragging legs through the knee-deep tide, eyes focused on the actions of the people we were about to join. The walk out to the main contingent of animals took a few minutes, and brought us into waist deep water. Progress was slow and I noticed the odd fitting wetsuits that the people in my group are wearing. It occurred to me that they must have borrowed them as a sort of golden ticket to entry, to be allowed to help the whales. That was the feeling at the gate, only those with wet suits would be allowed in, and everyone wanted in. As we approached the crowd the group fanned out among the whales.

 

The long fin pilot whales that had been stranded are a kind of oceanic dolphin, closely related to orcas. They varied greatly in size, some were small, the length of a large man, those must have been the babies, others, the full grown males, were massive beasts with tails as wide as my finger tips could stretch. The average animal was probably 4 meters long and when propped on the sand, belly down, reached a tall man’s waist with its rounded dorsal fin.

 

I walked among the crowd of black fish and volunteers, not sure where to start. The feeling was overwhelming, a mass of dead animals on the shore, the cries and confused squeaks of lost and pained animals on the sand flats. I walked over to a large whale lying on its side and touched its head. It didn’t flinch; its eyes pinched shut. It seemed to breath by holding its breath, an unnatural act out of the water. It exhaled suddenly, in a burst of spume, and just as abruptly pulled in a gulp of air and sucked the lips of its blowhole closed, appearing to push out onto the closed opening like child with its mouth full of water. The breaths were strained, the mass of its own body, removed from the lifting buoyant forces of water, pressing down on its lungs. It was as though the whole pod has been caught in an invisible avalanche and we were tasked with digging them out before they expired of exhaustion and suffocation. I grabbed the long handled shovel that sat near by and began to dig.

 

We worked all morning to roll the black slugs and dig out their fins. It took a few good-sized humans, well leveraged, to get one into position, belly down with the blow hole well clear of the water. After it was standing one person had to stay and prop the beast as the others dug out it’s fins and piled sand bags around it to keep it from rolling back over. The idea was that while on their sides the whales risked drowning before they could float again. When the tide came in it would cover their blow holes. Some whales could lift their heads out if the water and grab a breath of air even if the water was partially covering them. But if they were tired or hurt this maneuver was difficult and eventually whales would stop lifting their heads and stop breathing.

 

After much of the rolling was complete I joined a group of people who were forming a line out in the shoulder deep water to keep whales from coming back in and restranding. A volunteer from Jonah walked the length of the line calling out loudly. As she came near, an older woman in her sixties, I could hear her say, go in if your cold, are you shivering? You need to go in. You, she pointed to a woman in her late thirties blowing on her hands to warm them up, you’re too cold. You need to leave. The accused woman looked offended, dropping her head at a tilt in an exaggerated gesture of rhetorical questioning, really? You got to be kidding me. The Jonah volunteer forcefully steered the woman’s shoulders back to the shore. I could see that the younger woman wanted to protest, but couldn’t find the grounds to make her claim and so succumbed to the insanity being forced onto her. I exchanged looks of humor with the guy standing next to me, and he whispered, the cold police are coming. We both tried to look warm as she passed.

 

By noon, the low tide, all the whales were high and dry, flipped and covered. I returned to the beach and got my camera, as it seemed there was a lull in the action. Small groups had formed around each whale. On the edge of the crowd a family worked around a massive whale covered in a sheet patterned with songbirds and flowers, like the wallpaper of a hospital. The older children and parents were digging shallow wells while the school aged ones were filling plastic sandcastle buckets with water and ferrying the slops back to the whale where they would slowly pour it out. After dumping out the water the young workers would stand and wait for some response, some signal of success, something to show them that they had made a difference. When inevitably the great whale revealed nothing the children would abruptly turn and return to the wells to fill up their bucket again.

 

As I walked among the crowd I saw teenage girls sitting in the wet sand and talking to their whales. Mothers tried to explain to their children why they shouldn’t sit on the whales. A man without his shirt on was wearing a whalebone necklace carved into a whale tail; another woman had a large whale tattooed on her leg. People were having an experience, people were taking selfies, news cameras were walking around interviewing people. One group of tourists stood in front of the line of dead whales and posed for a picture, arms around each other smiling. Seeing this I felt uncomfortable and looked down at my camera. Taking pictures wasn’t going to kill the whales, I reasoned, but there seemed to be some line of bad taste. I returned to the beach and put away the camera.

 

We had been working all day rolling whales; we were cold and wet and hungry. There were enough people watering the beasts to last until nightfall and they had already told us we would have to leave before the next tide. It took us the rest of the afternoon to walk the long stretch of beach back to the car park, unsuit and have a few cups of tea. When we finally drove back onto the dirt road that led away from the spit we had to pull over to let an ambulance pass. I asked a passerby on foot if they know what was going on and they told me that an old lady had gotten hypothermia standing out in the water. I smiled and wondered if it was the cold police.

 

Part II – What did we know?

 

Back at the campsite, an hour’s drive from the spit, we made dinner and looked for updates on someone’s phone. There was discussion and disagreement and indecision about the benefit of returning the next day. Some of us felt futility; there wasn’t enough information about what we were doing. To start with, why were the whales stranding? If we didn’t understand that basic fact then our efforts might be misguided, ineffectual, or even detrimental. What did we know? The whales might just re-strand, or maybe they would not return to life at sea. What happens to the whales that end up back in the ocean after most of their family dies?

 

After dinner I read the Wikipedia article on pilot whales, soon I was skipping around from article to article trying to understand what we know and what we think we know about why pilot whales strand on Farewell Spit. I’m not sure that I came away having really answered the question of why, but there are indications, hints and ideas that makeup at least some of the picture.

 

There seem to be three elements to the story of pilot whale strandings: behavior, circumstance, and location. Let’s begin with behavior.  Pilot whales have an exaggerated sense of social dependence. They grow up in small family groups ruled by the oldest mother. A family group of say 10 whales would all be the children or grand children of one whale. I’m sure alternative family situations occur, like maybe the great aunt rules the pod, but what’s important is that individuals are in constant contact with their family, and especially their matriarch, their entire lives. Even into adulthood the full-grown males will never leave their mommy (think – Tiny, the misnamed bike-gang leader, has a mom-heart tattooed on his face).

 

I think it’s also important to establish that pilot whales are both intelligent and socially complex. It is possible for someone to argue that the dumb beasts simply get confused and run aground. In some ways they do get trapped, but I am unwilling to assume that it is because of lack of adaption to their environment or simpleness. Intelligence is difficult to measure, but from the biology we can at least tell that pilots have a sizable brain to use. They are famous for having more neocortical neurons than humans (where the neocortex is the bit of the brain that does all the higher functioning and abstract thinking. It contains the frontal lobe). Our understanding of the brain is nascent, but one thing is clear and that is pilots have highly developed (evolutionarily speaking) brains.

 

The second consideration is circumstance. More than 300 whales stranded on farewell spit and many more were left swimming out in the shallows. Pilot whales form small family groups of 10-20 whales, but will sometimes, or some people even say frequently, collect in larger groups, or super-pods.  This allows for broader socializing and mating with genetically diverse individuals. These groups can get very large with hundreds of whales all swimming together. It is often enough during these times when strandings occurs, so there is reason to believe that some aspect of these super-pods relates to the cause of the strandings.

 

The last part of the equation is location or, more specifically, the under water topology of the area surrounding the stranding. This part of Golden Bay is a sort of natural whale trap that takes advantage of pilot whales means of communication and location-sense to create a snare. These whales primarily use echolocation to visualize their surroundings. This makes sense since most of the time they are not around complex topology but instead just have objects in space moving around them (fish or other whales in open water). The waters they live in don’t have good visibility, sometimes only a few meters or less, so good eyesight is not very useful. The issue is that in this particular area the shallow terrain makes echolocation also terrible for seeing. The ocean floor is completely sand, gradually sloping, and very shallow, with much of it emptying at low tide. The gradually sloping terrain and homogenous, featureless bottom have a channeling effect on the sonar signals, like a fiber optic cable the signals are reflected back and forth off the surface and the ocean floor until they are dampened into the shoreline, and with no signal returning to help descry the surrounding area, the radar screen looks blank. Essentially the whales are blind.

 

As far as I can find there is no unifying theory with supporting (measurable) evidence that explains the phenomenon of stranding. There is a narrative that makes sense to me but it’s mostly based on conjecture, drawing conclusion from studies looking at social behaviors not directly related to stranding. We have to take disparate points of understanding about their lives and try to form a plausible story particular to this place.

 

Whatever instinct drives them, even if inadvertently, to strand, must mostly be to the advantage of the species. An overwhelming cooperative response to distress could be such a trait. Strandings then could be seen as a rare and unfortunate consequence of an otherwise evolutionarily advantageous behavior, which, coupled with this particular location, leads to mass death events.

 

If they were smart, some people argue, they should be able to understand the danger of the shallow bay with its sandy bottom and falling tide and communicate it to the rest of the pod. Before I went to the stranding and especially before I saw the animals trying to maneuver in shallow water it was hard to believe that they simply got caught like a lobster in a trap. They are too smart, too organized, and with complex language able to communicate with each other it doesn’t seem plausible that they simply get confused. But, after spending time watching them I have started to understand that it isn’t a matter of intelligence at all but of behavior and circumstance.

 

When the whales started to float people kept trying to lead them off to deep water, but they didn’t care about deep water, to start with they couldn’t really see which way was deeper because they were blind to the terrain, but more importantly they were more concerned with finding family members. As the water rose they could start to use the water to call out to each other, repeating what I can imagine to be their name and the name of the whales they are trying to find. It’s like a crowd, all blind, shouting for each other, lost, scared and confused. In this way intelligence is not the driving factor of their actions but instead the behavioral desire to stick together dominates decision-making. It’s not that they don’t know what was happening it is that they are hard wired to act collectively and to help each other instead of save themselves. In most situations this likely saves lives,  and is thus an advantageous response. It is only in very particular situations, like this one, that such a response causes a critical and progressive failure leading to death.

 

 

The best way for me to understand how the desire to help each other can lead to mass strandings is to imagine a hypothetical scenario. Suppose a large group of many pods is in the area of Golden Bay. The bays in this area of New Zealand are protected from the dominantly SW weather and offer good feeding and breeding grounds. Many of the deeper bays further toward the Able Tasman National Park are full of noisy boats and tourists enjoying the beaches, so the pod moves out the long finger of farewell spit. The pod, not really directed in any dictatorial way, but under the influence of many smaller pods each with its internal family hierarchy, drifts into the gradual shallows. Amongst the crowd and confusion a young one or two might get trapped in a shallow area and get confused. The animals can’t tell which direction is out, or even that the shore is getting close, so they get disoriented and with the tide going out one of them gets stuck and calls out for help.

 

Now the other whales, maybe a leader (they are called pilot whales because it was thought that one individual led the other around as a pilot does) follows the distress calls of the young one(s). A leader then gets stuck, others come in response to the distress calls, and soon hundreds are stranded. They strand slowly as the tide runs down, trying to reorganize and find their family groups in the deepening confusion of more and more distress calls echoing into the receding tide. If a mother becomes stuck trying to find her youngest young, her other children, adults with children themselves, will try and find her, and when they do they will stay close to her, not wanting to leave her side. They have always been together and it’s not likely they would part even when facing death. If you take as an assumption that the whales will always try and stay together in their family groups it is easy to see how a chain reaction could quickly develop and end in hundreds of beached whales, piled in family groups along the shoreline.

 

I can see how hundreds of (otherwise intelligent) humans could die in the same manner. Imagine a group of people, all with their families in tow, stuck on the third floor of some smoky building. Their eyes pinched shut, shouting for loved ones as the smoke got hotter and the air thickened. Travel slowly becoming more difficult. People would be crawling, bumping into each other desperately looking for children, husbands, and grandmothers. Fire fighters would surly find them in the rubble, as we found the whales: asphyxiated, lying in postures of search or in piles of loved ones found too late.

 

 

So what did we know? Did we know enough to convince ourselves that we should go back the next day and help the rescue effort?. Even if we were able to tell ourselves a story about why the whales were stranding we still couldn’t know how our actions were effecting the whales. But what was the alternative? Even if what we were doing was useless, and ignorant of the real cause behind the mass death, what happens if we do nothing? We, humans in general, could simply let it happen. Maybe some whales would refloat with the tide and swim off. But some would surely drown as the tide rose, unable to lift for a breath as the water covered their blowholes. Some would simply die from suffocation under their own weight, as their organs failed. They would begin to hemorrhage and to bleed from various orifices, I saw several whales with blood coming from their eyes. Others would burn in the sunlight, blessed with a thick black hide perfect for cold oceans they are up prepared for the mid day sun.  As the day matures the whales blister and burn, their skin forming large bulbous air pockets that burst and peel open. At some strandings whales are shot in order to save them from suffering this kind of death.

 

In the end we don’t really know what we are doing, how our actions affect the whales. But at a minimum we are making the beached whales more comfortable in their dying hour. At best we are giving them a chance to live, even if that is not a reality, they would have no chance if we didn’t float them. Eventually the optimists among and within us prevailed and we decided to return to the spit and sleep the night there. In the morning we would be ready to help if they needed it

 

 

Part III – Return to the sea.

The sun began to light the tops of trees with its morning orange. People crawled out of vans and dew covered tents and began to migrate toward the beach gate. The tall man in blue stood infront of the people and told us that no whales had died in the night. The quite sound of smiling came from the crowd. Someone made to cheer but was silenced by the calm of the morning crowd. As we walked the beach toward the whales we began to warm in our wet suits. Many of the people had not seen the piles of dead whales. Some people gasped and stopped and knelt or held their faces tightly. Most of the volunteers walked past the dead, invisible to them in their focus.

 

The sheets had been removed from the whales the night before in hopes that they would refloat on the midnight tide and swim away. We stopped at the nearest point of beach to the stranded pod and collected shovels and handfuls of used cloth, wet sandy and torn.

 

The second day was much like the first. Small groups of busy humans clustered around motionless black lumps of flesh. Heavy breathes and squeaks, shouts for more water, hurried men, interviews, confusion. I tried to stay away from people telling me what to do, I tried not to tell people what to do, unless they looked really confused. I collected with a few strong-arm looking folks and we took to rolling whales as the tide came in. We started at the far part of the pack and one by one flipped the whales onto their bellies. During the night the tide had come in and floated all the whales, those that had stayed settled back onto their sides. Some were clearly new as DOC had been marking each whale with a giant yellow whale marking crayon; one line for alive, an X for dead.

 

 

The tide quickly rose and it was clear that there were not enough volunteers to flip all the whales in time. The day before people had rushed to help, but this was day three and interest had waned. People were physically tired, or had to work, or lost hope. We frantically flipped whales as the tide came up around them. Four or five people struggled to dig out a trench on one side to ease the rolling, and careful attention had to be paid to the delicate fins. As the water got to be knee high blow holes started to go under. We would roll a whale and move on, leaving one person to dig in their shoulder to the whale and hold it upright. As we rolled one in a group others would lift up to take a breath, clearly straining and desperate, but we were not enough people and we could not do the work fast enough. A voice would call from the edge of the pack, a girl pleading for help, kneeling next to her chosen whale that had lifted to breath, and lifted to breath, but was not lifting anymore. Help, she would yell, she stopped breathing. There were now whales on their sides with large yellow X marks, whales that were alive before the tide, whales that we did not get to in time. There were so many dead whales we couldn’t think of individuals. It was triage.

 

As the tide came around the shallowest whales and each was righted or died people found themselves leaned next to a whale, holding it upright, waiting for the tide to come up enough to float it away. People where breathing in the air, settling, listing to the sharp slurps of breath from their whale. I was digging my shoulder into a 3meter female with a small but vocal youth a meter away. As the water came up the young one floated first. He immediately came over to his mother and nuzzled her. Several times he tried to push me away. I don’t know why, or what he was thinking, but he was gentle enough about it. They do have big teeth and he could have taken off my arm if he wanted, but in some way I knew he wouldn’t even nip me.

 

As the mother began to gain movement there were times when they lost contact with each other. They didn’t seem to be able to see even though they had small black eyes. When they lost physical contact with each other they would intensify their movement and start swimming in circles, calling out until they made contact again. Once they were in contact they were willing to move out toward the deeper water where we were told to usher them.

 

There was again confusion with some people believing that the whales simply wanted to return to the sea, and not understanding when many stayed shallow, or circled back toward the shore, looking for loved ones, calling out. The plan was to let them congregate and then once they were together, usher them out.

 

A large female had been taken out to deep water in the hope that the others would follow. In some way the idea of the one pilot whale persists and a pilot female was selected in the hopes she would lead the rest to safety. Slowly the whales found who they called for, or were forced to abandon their search by humans or other whales and all the whales swam out to deeper water. Again a human chain formed to keep them out. I don’t know what time it was when we made the long walk back to he car.

 

On the drive home and for the next few days we followed the news about the strandings. A few whales restranded at a new location the next day, but people were able to refloat them. There was a ‘mega-pod’ swimming around the bay and there was talk of the biggest stranding ever. In the end the whales went away, to wherever they go, splitting off in their groups, not knowing what happened, or traumatized and in mourning, who knows the minds of these creatures.

 

People want to make the event human. They want to be effective, positively or negatively. I several times overheard people referring to off-shore drilling activity, and the use of sonic technologies in mining exploration as a reason for the carnage. I can’t say if this is true or not, people have measurable effects on the lives of other animals, and many of those effects are not well understood or even known about. That said, whales have been stranding for a long time, there is bone record of whales stranding on this very beach since before man came to New Zealand. People want to be the cause of the problem so that there is someone to blame, and so that there is a clear solution. If humans are doing it then it can be stopped. But I fear the reason all those whales died, and why thousands have died in this way is more complex than offshore soundings. Maybe humans played a part, we certainly are now, rolling the big fish in the wet sand and covering them with flower patterned sheets donated to the op-shop by an unsuspecting blue hair, but by assuming humans are the only cause seems political, and ignores the work that has been done to understand what is actually going on out at Farewell Spit.