Around 90 whales dead as hundreds stranded on a sandbar off Tasmanian coast

Team Udayavani, Sep 22, 2020, 6:15 PM IST

Around 90 whales have died and a 270 more are still stranded in a remote bay in southern Australia as a “challenging” rescue operation began Tuesday.

Around 270 of the whales have been stranded on a sandbar off the Macquarie Heads boat ramp. There is also a group of 30 stranded “several hundred metres away” on another sandbar, and 30 others stranded on Ocean Beach.

A team of about 40 trained rescuers began to “re-float” a small number of whales using equipment to push the animals off a sandbar into deeper waters.

BBC report states that  although it is unknown what drew the whales to the shore, experts claim that around Australia and New Zealand different kinds of whales make seasonal migrations every year in pods as large as a 1,000 animals.

They follow a leader and their strong social bonds can lead to whole groups beaching themselves. It might have been a single misadventure by one or two of them and because pilot whales are such a social species, that may have drawn the other animals in