Australian rescuers yesterday saved 11 stranded whales by moving them by road to another beach and dragging them out to sea after a mass stranding in Tasmania, an official said.
A pod of 64 pilot whales, most of them females and calves, beached on Anthony’s Beach on the southern island of Tasmania on Saturday. Fifty-two of the giant animals died after the stranding but 12 surviving whales were looked after overnight by rescuers, Chris Arthur of Tasmania’s Parks and Wildlife Service said.
Rescuers placed nets around the animals, which measured between 3m to 5m and weighed up to 1.5 tonnes, yesterday morning and manually hauled them onto car trailers to take them to another beach.
“We used specially built car trailers, which we were able to put up to two whales in each. And we transported those animals 17km to Godfrey’s Beach,” Arthur said.
“We have successfully released 11 animals out to sea,” Arthur said. “The last one went out less than 20 minutes ago.”
While the possibility that the animals would strand themselves again could not be ruled out, he said, the hope was that they would instead join up with other pilot whales in the ocean. Some the whales have been tagged and aerial reconnaissance is planned to check on their progress.
“We have had a reasonable outcome. They will form a small pod. We have given them the best chance they have got,” said Arthur, a regional officer with the Tasmanian state parks and wildlife service.
This pod of whales, around one-third of them juveniles, were found stranded on Saturday along a stretch of Anthony’s Beach at Stanley on the island’s northwest coast, a site where repeated strandings have occurred in the past.
Pilot whales are among the smaller whales, typically up to about 5m in length and dark with a grey underbelly. Their relatively small size may have helped rescuers save them, environmentalists said.
Although most of the pod could not be saved, a team of around 65 people battled throughout much yesterday to move 12 survivors, including both adults and juveniles, 17km by road in trailers to nearby Godfrey’s Beach to try to return them to the sea. One whale died during the operation.
Mass strandings of whales occur periodically in Australia and New Zealand for reasons that are not entirely understood. Theories include disturbance of echo-location, possibly by interference from sound produced by human activities at sea, a spokeswoman for the environmental group Greenpeace said.
The state government said satellite trackers had been placed on some of the released whales and a reconnaissance plane would fly over the area today to check on the whales’ progress.
The attempted assassination of former US president Donald Trump by a shooter at a rally in Pennsylvania has confirmed the worst fears of public figures warning that an escalation in incendiary political rhetoric on all sides could lead to bloodshed. US lawmakers and analysts have been voicing concern since the Jan. 6, 2021, US Capitol riot that increasingly bellicose campaign language was becoming a worrying contusion on the US body politic ahead of November’s presidential election. The danger was vividly illustrated in 2022, when then-US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked with a hammer by a far-right conspiracy theorist
A high-ranking North Korean diplomat stationed in Cuba defected to South Korea in November last year — just months before Seoul and Havana established diplomatic ties, the South Korean National Intelligence Service said yesterday. North Korean diplomat Ri Il-kyu had been responsible for political affairs at Pyongyang’s embassy in Cuba since 2019, tasked specifically “with obstructing the establishment of diplomatic relations between South Korea and Cuba,” South Korea’s Chosun Daily reported. Ri defected to South Korea with his wife and children in early November, making him the highest-ranking North Korean diplomat known to have defected since then-North Korean deputy ambassador to the
HIGH TENSIONS: Local media reported that police had fired into the air to try to disperse an angry crowd at the garbage dump, while investigators called for calm and cooperation A total of eight bodies, all female, have been recovered so far from a garbage dump near Nairobi, Kenya’s acting police chief said yesterday, after authorities a day earlier confirmed they had found more bags filled with dismembered female body parts, the latest macabre discovery that has horrified and angered the country. Detectives have been scouring the site in the Mukuru area of Nairobi since the mutilated corpses of at least six women were found on Friday in sacks floating in a sea of garbage. On Saturday, the Kenyan Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) said that five bags had been retrieved from
A World War I veteran is the first person identified from graves filled with more than 100 victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre that devastated the city’s black community, the mayor said on Friday. Using DNA from descendants of his brothers, the remains of C.L. Daniel from Georgia were identified by Intermountain Forensics, said Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum and officials from the lab. The man was in his 20s when he was killed. “This is one family who gets to give a member of their family that they lost a proper burial, after not knowing where they were for over a century,”