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Die-off of Southern Right whales raises alarm bells
last update: Mar 22, 2010 12:30 PM
From a "Latin American Herald Tribune" article: Experts, analyzing the phenomenon, say that the scientific community is alarmed by the die-off of Southern Right whales along the coasts of Argentine Patagonia.
More than 300 of the whales have been found dead on the beaches of Valdes Peninsula on the Atlantic Ocean in the last three years, a number far beyond what would be considered normal, they said.
The Peninsula, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, previously counted about 30 dead whales a year.
The president of the Argentine Whale Conservation Institute, Diego Taboada, said “It has been established that a die-off like this was a completely unknown phenomenon and nothing like it has been seen anywhere else in the world. It has alerted the entire scientific community.”
During a workshop, sponsored by the International Whaling Commission, whale and health experts from several countries got together to find out what the cause might be.
“One of the main problems we have is that when whale fatalities are reported and we find them, they have already been dead for several days. The whales literally cook in their own fat, their organs decompose and that stops us from getting samples of their blood or from different organs that would allow us to perform an analysis to determine the causes of death,” Taboada said.
According to veterinarian Marcela Uhart of the Wildlife Conservation Society, experts analyzing the surge in the mortality rate have ruled out a number of factors that have impacted right whales in other parts of the world. For example, she said they have ruled out the possibility of the deaths being caused by colliding with ships or being caught in fishing nets as happens to this whale species in other parts of the world where they are in danger of extinction.
Uhart said that there is no clear pattern of death among southern right whales, so that experts even doubt that there is a common cause of death, since there are “innumerable factors” that could have an influence.
Read more:
Latin American Herald Tribune, 22nd March 2010
