Why Healthy Whales Are Suddenly Ending Up on Beaches

0:00 The whales we're gonna talk about today, they weren't sick. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is the How to Protect the Ocean podcast, and if you are interested in knowing more about the ocean, need a resource to find out more about the ocean, what's happening, the good, the bad, maybe the ugly at some point, I want you to hit that follow button right now because this is the podcast for you. You're gonna learn everything five days a week on this podcast. Normally, we do a solo show Monday through Thursday, and then we'll do an interview. This week, we're gonna be doing five randomized podcasts, solo podcasts, Monday to Friday. Normally, there's a theme. Today we're just gonna randomize, gonna go back to the old school How to Protect the Ocean podcast, and I can't wait to get into it 'cause we're gonna talk about these whales, these pilot whales.

0:45 Why are healthy whales ending up stranded on beaches? Every time you see a stranding or news of a stranding... I've never seen a stranding live. I don't know if I can handle it emotionally. You have people who react to them. You have whale stranding networks. There's some in the UK. There's some in North America. There are some all over the world, and these are a lot of times volunteers that will patrol or go out. They're trained to specifically handle beached whales situations or any kind of beaching of any type of animal, and they go out, and they make sure the right authorities know what to do, or they can come out to these whale strandings. But it's really difficult to go out there. You have these whales that a lot of the times they don't make it. They come onto the beach.

1:26 We don't really know why they're coming onto the beach. A lot of times, if it's like pilot whales, they tend to follow the leader. And if the leader's sick or it ends up beaching itself, the entire pod will beach itself as well. So it's a difficult situation to look at. In this latest or recent study that was reported by phys.org, which is a great site as well, looked at a major pilot whale stranding in Scotland, where more than 50 whales were stranded. That is insane amount. Now, like I said, pilot whales, they come in large pods. We don't know why they really beach themselves, but they're known to beach. They beach in New Zealand, up in the UK. This is not necessarily a rare occasion. It's just one that we've seen a lot.

2:07 And the ones that were stranded, these 50, many of them were in good health before it actually happened. That's what makes this one different. The detail that really changes this story is that most of the animals were healthy. They weren't sick, they weren't disoriented, they didn't have any problems with them. All the animals that stranded and ended up dying, they were actually healthy. This wasn't a disease, and it wasn't an obvious injury. Instead, researchers found something else, and this is where it really comes into play. Like the mysteries of the ocean, everything that comes on. These whales had been feeding in areas that were closer to the continental shelf, right near shallow coastal zones, which these pilot whales aren't really there.

2:49 Now, these places are productive, but they can be dangerous because of the shallowness of the area. Whales follow food. That's how the ocean works. But when food shifts, so do whales, right? That happens with a lot of these animals. They gotta go where their food is. And now, these days, with everything going on in the world, you have climate change that is shifting where these fish are going, where whales are going to follow the fish, where upwellings happen. And if you don't know what an upwelling is, essentially It's a place like, on the ocean where cold, nutrient-rich waters come from deep in the ocean, they come up to the surface, and it brings fish around 'cause you get a lot of plankton in those upwellings. The fish will come to feed on the plankton.

3:30 The larger fish and marine mammals and sea turtles and everything will come in and feed on everything else that's coming in. Seabirds will dive in, and it's actually quite a productive area. You have a lot of these different areas around the ocean that are being shifted around because currents are shifting, 'cause wind patterns are shifting, because the climate is changing, and that's what we have to go with. And so it becomes really difficult to track where these new areas are. Like, let's go back to marine mammals that were being killed, like the North Atlantic right whale on the East Coast of North America. They were normally in the US. They would go from Jacksonville, Florida, in the winter all the way up to, say, like, New England and Maine in the summers. Then, all of a sudden, they started to go into the Gulf of St. Lawrence and up in Canada.

4:11 Why are they up there? It's warmer waters. They can extend their range because it's warmer waters, and they ended up being there, and 17 of them that summer that we found them there ended up dying because the ships weren't ready for them. The ships ran into them. They got entangled from fishing gear, and they ended up dying. A lot of the shifts had to change. Not only are we seeing a shift in ecology, but we have to get into a shift of how we conduct ourselves in the ocean during that time. So that's essentially what's been happening. The shifts of animals coming into closer to shore can bring these marine mammals that follow the prey into risky environments, which is essentially shallow water. That's probably their biggest crux. As my daughter would say, the biggest op. I know. I'm older. I, I don't... I- it doesn't work.

4:51 It doesn't feel good coming off my lips. But whatever. Yeah, yeah, I said it. I said it there. I said I'm not editing that out regardless. But, you know, shallow waters have complex coastlines. Places where navigation can become harder. It's difficult for pilot whales to go in. You add one more layer that pilot whales are highly social. If one individual gets into trouble, like I mentioned earlier, the entire group will actually follow. And when you have an entire group that's following one animal or a couple of animals that are going through, this social behavior amplifies the risk of what is gonna happen to these animals. They're in coastal waters. They're close to coastal waters, where navigation can be difficult. They navigate using echolocation. That shallow water compared to deep water, the sound reverberations that they use to look for the way they're going, their navigation, can really throw them off and disorientate them in these shallow areas.

5:40 So as they're going through the shallow areas, they get disoriented, they lose their navigation, they end up getting beached, and then because they're so social, a lot of the other animals will just follow them even though they're healthy. So one mistake becomes a mass stranding, and this is the key insight here. Strandings are not just random. They are signals telling us that the ocean is changing. And so when we have a changing ocean, we have a lot of stuff going on. And to keep updated on finding out what's going on in this changing ocean, I want you to hit that follow button right now on this podcast so you make sure you don't miss any of the episodes where we talk about the different things that are changing in the ocean. Yesterday, we talked about sea cucumbers decreasing and how because of fisheries, because how important that is and how important they are to the ecosystem.

6:22 Now, we're talking about pilot whale stranding and how healthy ones will strand because they are very curious. They're social animals. They wanna stay with their pods, and they will go until they are very much in trouble. So hit that follow button so you make sure you know everything that's going on because we're gonna get down into what needs to happen next. If we don't wanna see this, 'cause we're gonna see more of this, we're likely gonna see more of these pilot whales stranding, not because the whales are failing, because the ocean is shifting. Prey is moving. Conditions are changing, and species are adapting in real time. They're adapting 'cause they need to. A lot of the times, people will look at climate change and look at everything that's happening, and they'll tell me, "Andrew, like, why do we need to change?

7:03 I love the hot weather. It's great when we get a shorter winter and a hotter summer or a longer spring, summer, fall because those are the seasons I like. I don't wanna be in Canada in the snow for long." As winter ends here in Canada, here in Ontario, people are like, "When's spring coming? When's spring coming?" So much so that we look to a groundhog to tell us when spring is coming. That's how much we don't like it by the end of the winter. We love winter for a little bit, but after a few weeks of really cold, people are like, "When's summer coming?" And so, people are not ready to change to that. And a lot of times they don't see the change. They don't see that they need to change because they haven't been affected too much yet or personally yet. Although many people around the world are being impacted. Now, that has been a buildup, and we're starting to see what is happening.

7:45 But the animals that are in the ocean have to change because they need their food. And when their food moves, they need to move too. So the question now is whether we can track those shifts, like these ocean shifts, fast enough to understand and respond. Like, how can we do this? So there's modeling and then monitoring of these fisheries and where they're gonna go, doing stock assessments, why they're shifting, what are the major components? Is it temperature? Is it because their prey is shifting 'cause currents are shifting? And what's gonna happen when these marine mammals come close to the shore or close to coastal areas? Again, are we gonna go out there and try and divert them outwards? What happens to their food? Are they gonna be emaciated? Who knows what's gonna happen in the future? But this is where the call to action is, where we need more funding of just fundamental science, fundamental ocean research, that will actually have applications to the real world problems that we see each and every day.

8:38 So that is teaming up with coastal communities, like, so the science community teaming up with coastal communities and be like, "What are you looking for? What are you seeing out there along your coastline that you have seen for generations?" Whether it's indigenous communities or non-indigenous, anybody who has been there for a long time can tell you what's been happening to the fisheries, what's been happening to the coastline, what's been happening to sea level rise, temperature, shifts in wind, shift in currents, shifts in prey, anything, they are able to tell it. And allow the scientists to come in and collaborate with those local communities to be able to find out solutions on how they can actually, just sit there and be like, "Hey, you know what? We can actually adapt to this." These whales didn't make a mistake.

9:20 They followed the ocean as it changed. We're gonna see that a lot more. And that is something that is scary to see because these are healthy whales and we're gonna see more of these whales do this, but their prey is shifting closer to the coastline. This may not be a problem if the prey shifted like further away from the coastline, but they're coming in. And so now it's a problem, and now we need to have better monitoring in the future. I would love to hear what you think, 'cause this podcast, this whole thing, is the start of a conversation, not just this episode. But this is why I started this podcast 11 years ago. I wanna hear from you. I wanna have that conversation. Reach out to me on my socials. You can see it in the description. You can subscribe to my newsletter, speakupforblue.com/newsletter, that I send out every Monday to Friday.

10:02 And of course, you can always hit me up at speakupforblue.com/feedback. Leave a voicemail or you can type in your feedback. I would love to hear from you. If you listen to this podcast more than once a day or even this is your first time, I'd love to hear your thoughts, your comments, anything, criticisms even. I would love to hear from you. I wanna thank you so much for joining me on this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time, and happy conservation.