In the News: 125 Pilot Whales Die on New Zealand Beaches
I just read a sad story about whales that beached themselves today on two beaches in New Zealand. The locals were able to rescue 43 whales while the rest died. Of course the reason they beached themselves remains unknown. My internet survey in the world of Google brought up an article in Scientific American that says beaching could be due to disease, weather, interference from sonar on ships, or reactions to a predator. Not a lot of concrete data pointing to any cause. It also appears as if there are whale beachings fairly regularly all over the world every year. It isn’t that rare of an event. Read about some more 2009 events here, here, here, here, and here.
Why do these stories always bother people so much and cause so many to be sad and dismayed at the loss of life? Is it because whales are large and seemingly intelligent? Is it the mass numbers of whales that die at once? Or is it the notion of another species intentionally ending its life that bothers us so much? I would guess it is a mix of all these things. I suspect we wouldn’t react this way if it were lots of flies or spiders that seemed to commit suicide in large groups.
I am unaware of any other animals that actually kill themselves en mass (that story about the lemmings is all poppycock by the way – Disney made it up and killed a bunch of lemmings for a film and now we have a widespread myth). Apparently whales have been beaching themselves for hundreds if not thousands of years. People have recorded such occurrences throughout history and there obviously wasn’t military sonar 800 years ago to cause the beaching. Once again we are faced with a natural mystery that we can’t answer yet but keep investigating. Maybe someday we’ll really know why this happens so regularly.
First...hahaha...sadness if it were spiders and flies? That's funny. Don't get me wrong...I like spiders, not so much the flies...although I know they're important in the food chain too. But I think flies do commit mass suicide in people's windows in the spring and summer, eh? ;)
ReplyDeleteSeriously though, about the whales, I think it's a little bit of it all. Whales of all sorts are so grand a creature, intelligent, mysterious. As you noted, though not uncommon, it is an odd behavior. I try picturing if humans would react the same way to...up the food chain a bit from flies and spiders...say, raccoons or moose...both of which are not endangered, but smart or impressive animals in different ways.
We've been so attuned to "save the whales", do we have a different perspective for them? Is there a sense of guilt at all in this, since we don't really know WHY they do it...maybe it's "our" fault? Because they don't have legs and can't get back up to walk out to see, we feel that it's incumbent upon us to help them?
Regardless of all that...it is still sad.
I do think there is an element of guilt to the whole 'save the whales' campaign. But I don't think that raccoons would get support like whales do. Raccoons carry diseases that humans can get and they can be pests in other ways. Whales on the other hand are 'gentle and peaceful' and i don't know that they really cause problems for people but we sure have caused the whales problems. Moose might get more support though.:)
ReplyDelete