Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com. Hey, this is Alison modam like, the
Speaker 1: science editor at how staff works dot com. And this
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb, science writer at how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the podcast today. You were talking about relatively
Speaker 1: sad question. Actually, um, why do Wales speach themselves? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I was fortunate enough to attend a lecture recently at
Speaker 1: the Georgia Aquarium here in Atlanta, hosted by Dr Gregory D. Bossart,
Speaker 1: who is their chief Fetinary Officer senior vice president and
Speaker 1: his special this is his specialty dealing with with the
Speaker 1: question of why be Wales beach themselves? And uh, he's
Speaker 1: involved in a number of rescue and rehabilitation UM programs
Speaker 1: as well. And it's it's really, yeah, a much deeper
Speaker 1: question than you might think. It's not like on par
Speaker 1: with pointed boat it wash up on the shore. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean we've all seen the news story. What were
Speaker 1: you saying about. You know, if a news organization had
Speaker 1: a choice between a beach whale or a car chase,
Speaker 1: it would be tough to just which. I mean, like
Speaker 1: if if you return on Fox News and they had
Speaker 1: to choose between like a you know O. J. Simpson
Speaker 1: style car chase and a beach whale. I mean in
Speaker 1: terms of like sensational stories that you can cover by helicopter,
Speaker 1: those are two of the big ones, you know, because
Speaker 1: instantly you have this this poor you know, um aquatic
Speaker 1: mammal that we can all sort of empathize with on
Speaker 1: some level, you know, stranded, helpless, and then all these
Speaker 1: these well meaning but ultimately kind of clueless people, um
Speaker 1: in many cases except for the actual marine biologists you know,
Speaker 1: on the scene, you know, trying to help the animal,
Speaker 1: you know, push it back out the sea or or
Speaker 1: or or you know, daused with water to keep it
Speaker 1: from overheating. Um. You know, this massive effort to save it. Right.
Speaker 1: It's a media circuits. But it's sad. It's sad. Although
Speaker 1: I will add, as you mentioned that sometimes on thats
Speaker 1: do succeed in saving some of the marine mammals that
Speaker 1: are stranded you know by right. Yeah, sometimes it is
Speaker 1: um a situation where they can just push the animal
Speaker 1: right back out to sea and it's fine. Um. Other
Speaker 1: times you push the animal out, get it back in
Speaker 1: the water, and then it just ends up right back
Speaker 1: on the beach, right but we'll talk about that in
Speaker 1: the sec Yeah. So, but that's the thing. It's a
Speaker 1: lot more complicated than just oh, it's back in the sea.
Speaker 1: You know. Oh it's a heavy way. We can't push
Speaker 1: it it. It's more involved. Okay, Sue, what is stranding beaching?
Speaker 1: It's pretty simple. It's when you see an animal that
Speaker 1: swimming or floating into shore and it gets stuck in
Speaker 1: the shallow waters. And we tend to think of animals
Speaker 1: like whales or dolphins running into this kind of problem,
Speaker 1: but actually it does happen to sea turtles, to and seals,
Speaker 1: and it's a big problem because you know, shallow water
Speaker 1: isn't their natural environment, and uh, if they actually come
Speaker 1: onto the beach, they're they're probably going to die without
Speaker 1: some sort of rescue effort. And how do they die.
Speaker 1: They end up overheating for starters, they need water who
Speaker 1: cool them? Right? And they're kind of prey for any predators.
Speaker 1: You know, if you're a whale and you're washed up
Speaker 1: on some Arctic shore and a poldar bearrar comes along, Um,
Speaker 1: you know, it's pretty much a foregone conclusion what's going
Speaker 1: to happen. Also, again, these animals are made to live
Speaker 1: in an ocean environment, so like their their weight distribution
Speaker 1: is all out of black if they're on the land.
Speaker 1: There are some some types of of whales that when
Speaker 1: they when they're washed ashore like that, their muscles end
Speaker 1: up atrophying on one side of their body and it
Speaker 1: actually causes the spine to to curve. So yeah, it's
Speaker 1: just a bad situation all around. So, like I said,
Speaker 1: it's mostly the cetaceans Um, the order that includes aquatic
Speaker 1: mostly marine mammals like your whales, your dolphins or purposes um.
Speaker 1: The bottle nose dolphin like flipper or whatever you think
Speaker 1: of when you think of that kind of dolphin is
Speaker 1: the most commonly streaded species. You look through the database
Speaker 1: on some of the organizations that deal with this issue,
Speaker 1: it's just bottlenose dolphins upon bottlenes dolphins, and part of
Speaker 1: that say they tend to live closer into shore, but
Speaker 1: that the number two species is actually the pygmy sperm
Speaker 1: whale CONSTI live in deeper waters. So yeah, and that
Speaker 1: actually leads me into the single stranding. So you have
Speaker 1: to kind of strandings. You're you're gonna have a loan
Speaker 1: individual or maybe an individual with offspring, or you're gonna
Speaker 1: have these mass strandings kind of like the Jim Jones
Speaker 1: cool a type of debacle. UM, But a single stranding
Speaker 1: is pretty straightforward. And this is just going to be
Speaker 1: when a sick animal beaches itself and the sickness could
Speaker 1: be parasites, it could be disease, it could be um
Speaker 1: ingestion of like a biotoxin, or it could be something
Speaker 1: you know, like it ran into a ship or something
Speaker 1: screwed up neurologically with the animal um and it can't
Speaker 1: really navigate winds up on the shore. Yeah. And interestingly,
Speaker 1: with the pitch me sperm whales that you were just
Speaker 1: talking about, they're kind of this funky, mysterious species and um,
Speaker 1: the deal with them is that they're actually suffering from
Speaker 1: heart disease and so by the time they wash up
Speaker 1: on shore, they're basically dying the slow death due to
Speaker 1: heart failure, which is I'm sorry, it's kind of dismal.
Speaker 1: I hope you guys otherwise have had a good day,
Speaker 1: but this is a bit of a grim topic. So UM,
Speaker 1: and then in the case of sick whales, you're also
Speaker 1: going to have um caps who follow their their moms,
Speaker 1: and they're hugely dependent on their moms for the first
Speaker 1: two years of their life, especially with dolphins. So um,
Speaker 1: if a mom has you know, some sort of sickness
Speaker 1: or injury or neurological impairment, then they're both going to
Speaker 1: strand themselves on shore. So that's kind of the single stranding,
Speaker 1: that's the that's the you know, the solo instance. But
Speaker 1: then you have these crazy mass strandings. Yeah, and some
Speaker 1: of these range from you know, it could you could
Speaker 1: be talking like a dozen whales that have washed up
Speaker 1: on the shore or and this just blows my mind,
Speaker 1: but New Zealand a thousand whales washed up on the shore.
Speaker 1: A thousand you know, it's crazy just to pop elliptic sounding,
Speaker 1: you know. And yes, so we're talking a lot of animals.
Speaker 1: And the weird thing is that while single strandings tend
Speaker 1: to involve animals that are sick or injured, animals that
Speaker 1: are dying in the final stages of their life, mass
Speaker 1: strandings will often include perfectly healthy animals that they're just
Speaker 1: you know, washed up on the shore. Dr Bosser actually
Speaker 1: told an interesting story about an incident he was present
Speaker 1: for it in which sixty four dolphins washed upon the shore,
Speaker 1: and um, some well meaning but otherwise, you know, untrained
Speaker 1: individuals from the area were on the scene, and so
Speaker 1: they did what might come seem natural to most of us.
Speaker 1: They started pushing the animals back out to sea. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: I would totally do that. So start pushing you know,
Speaker 1: all sixty four, you know, right out back into the water.
Speaker 1: And then what do they do? They wash up all
Speaker 1: of them again, just a little waist down the beach.
Speaker 1: This is there's a lot of mystery that still remains revolving,
Speaker 1: revolving around um these mass beachings. But the dominant theory
Speaker 1: is that they believe that there will be a particular
Speaker 1: leader dolphin, all right, and that leader something goes wrong,
Speaker 1: either it's an illness or something neurological, and they end
Speaker 1: up going going ashore and the others simply follow. So
Speaker 1: if you push them all back out, you know, they're
Speaker 1: just all going to follow the same leader back up
Speaker 1: onto the beach. So like in this particular case, they
Speaker 1: ended up having to euthanize most of the whales, you know,
Speaker 1: all but just a few, right, because I suppose they
Speaker 1: can't elect a leader on the spot or anything like
Speaker 1: that right. Yeah, there's just and you're you're doing with
Speaker 1: limited time, limited resources that they can't you know, stay
Speaker 1: out of the water indefinitely. It's it's a really heartbreaking situation.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about some of the other reasons beaching occurs,
Speaker 1: mainly the ones that we have a hand in, um
Speaker 1: like environmental climate change. Yeah, this is a big one,
Speaker 1: um Like. An interesting example of this is when say,
Speaker 1: a hooded seal washes up um in Florida. Hooded seal
Speaker 1: is an Arctic animal. What does an Arctic seal to
Speaker 1: going in Florida exactly? You know, and and they believe
Speaker 1: it has to do with well, there were two seals
Speaker 1: in this particular instance. Maybe it's a snowbird seal, you know,
Speaker 1: like the snowbirds they call old elderly people who hang
Speaker 1: out and you have cold spots during the summer and
Speaker 1: they migrate to But no, it's not that, No, well,
Speaker 1: I mean they did come to Florida to die, I guess,
Speaker 1: oh gosh. It was also they had bellies full of
Speaker 1: garbage because they had basically they were they were having
Speaker 1: to go further south um to try and uh and
Speaker 1: find food. Um. And and this all has to do
Speaker 1: with with something called environmental distress syndrome. In a nutshell,
Speaker 1: it comes down to this, if any kind of environmental
Speaker 1: change going on, and and the belief is that that
Speaker 1: humans have at least a hand in this, you know,
Speaker 1: and I'll leave everyone else to argue about that, but
Speaker 1: but you're changing the recipe for life on Earth, and
Speaker 1: it has at least a little bit and it can
Speaker 1: have you know, medications for the animal's healthy Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah, so suddenly and animals having to go a
Speaker 1: little further south or it's it's leading to you know,
Speaker 1: it's leading to the emergence of new diseases, which is
Speaker 1: which comes into play with for instance, the pygmy sperm whales. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, they all have this heart disease. And there's
Speaker 1: a theory that this may be linked to environmental distress syndrome.
Speaker 1: The environment is changing, it's creating new diseases are emerging.
Speaker 1: All diseases are re emerging. Um, everything's thrown into a
Speaker 1: state of flux. You know, all the dice have been
Speaker 1: rolled and they're they're coming around to a different arrangement. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And on a related environmental note, I actually read this
Speaker 1: study about chloride ion concentration in the water, and so
Speaker 1: chloride ions um are handy for preventing barnacle growth on
Speaker 1: your boat. But as it happens, they also affector into
Speaker 1: your sense of hearing. And if you mess with a
Speaker 1: number of chloride ions and you can mess with your hearing.
Speaker 1: So researchers have positive that this is one way that
Speaker 1: we're messing with cetation hearing. Another interesting theory has to
Speaker 1: do actually with sound. Obviously, the ocean is is filled
Speaker 1: with various noises and a number of these uh I mean,
Speaker 1: these these whales and dolphins use sound in something called
Speaker 1: um echolocation. It's basically sonar, all right, So when you
Speaker 1: start introducing new sounds, you know that that everything has
Speaker 1: not evolved to deal with UM. Take for instance, noise
Speaker 1: generated by oil rigs. UM. You can end up throwing
Speaker 1: this sense of this, this this navigational sense off all right. Right.
Speaker 1: You can even have noise from you know, giant ships
Speaker 1: trawling disease. And of particular interest, the U. S. Navy
Speaker 1: is currently funding research into this because they might be
Speaker 1: the ones to blame UM. There's a belief that that
Speaker 1: sonars sonar used in the submarine detection training exercises. Um,
Speaker 1: maybe aggravating gas bubbles in the whales livers, which it
Speaker 1: is unpleasant, yeah, which can actually result in decompression sickness. Um.
Speaker 1: So that's another sound related possibility that could be leading
Speaker 1: to a number of these like mass strandings. So interviewers
Speaker 1: basically with the animal's ability to communicate and thus right, yeah,
Speaker 1: throws off their compass and then they wind up on
Speaker 1: the shore and again you know, they go back out.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not going to do any good. So
Speaker 1: says someone notices a beach animal in the Sharan reports
Speaker 1: and you the marine biologists or whoever response to it, like,
Speaker 1: what are the options on the table? Well, um, sadly,
Speaker 1: I mean in many of these cases it ends up
Speaker 1: being used in Asia, you know, um, you know you
Speaker 1: have you know, even just like a hundred, much less
Speaker 1: say a thousand animals wash up on the beach. You know,
Speaker 1: if everybody you know committed themselves to the cause of
Speaker 1: saving these s wales, you wouldn't be able to do it. Um.
Speaker 1: So you gotta you know, you gotta pick and choose,
Speaker 1: and that means trying to determine which ones are the
Speaker 1: healthiest specimens that can either you know, you can either
Speaker 1: release or take back for rehabilitation. Impossible rerelease, and you
Speaker 1: can do that with like performing tooth extractions. They'll perform
Speaker 1: a tooth extraction on site to see you can instantly
Speaker 1: tell how all the the animal in question is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and obvious signs of like you know, disease age, you know,
Speaker 1: if they're covered with you know, scars from um, you know,
Speaker 1: altercations with sharks, etcetera. I also read that they can
Speaker 1: they're developing a device that can test the animals hearing
Speaker 1: on site. So if they're hearing is messed up, it's
Speaker 1: obviously such a key sense and that might be an
Speaker 1: indicator of how the animal fair back in the wild
Speaker 1: or in rehabilitation. And then you can also push them
Speaker 1: out to see and on occasions it does work, more
Speaker 1: often it doesn't. Yeah, I mean a big thing is
Speaker 1: one of their beach they have to just keeping them
Speaker 1: cool to you know, like keeping water on them, um
Speaker 1: and you know, keeping them from eating up too much. Uh.
Speaker 1: Interesting that when they die, it's not necessary. It's not
Speaker 1: a lost cause because a lot of what we know
Speaker 1: about what's wrong with these beached whales comes through performing
Speaker 1: utopsies net weather with an animal. It's called a good point.
Speaker 1: But but yeah, they'll the in fact, they have like
Speaker 1: trailers like necropsy necropsy trailers that they can just perform
Speaker 1: the autopsy on site. Sometimes they'll bring them in um
Speaker 1: and have them you know, you know, and and take
Speaker 1: care of them, you know, in a situation where they
Speaker 1: have a little more time. Um. And then there's rehabilitation,
Speaker 1: of course. Yeah. And this is a big one. This
Speaker 1: is um. Yeah, and this is you know exactly what
Speaker 1: it sounds like. You bring them in, uh, you work on,
Speaker 1: you know, addressing whatever the physical ailment is, and then
Speaker 1: try and get them back into shape to reintroduce them
Speaker 1: in the wild. Um. And this it's trickier than it sounds. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because you bring them in, you're then you're feeding them
Speaker 1: dead fish. Yeah. And they need to, you have to,
Speaker 1: they have to relearn how to eat live fish. Right.
Speaker 1: So I think one of the most famous examples of
Speaker 1: rehabilitation that perhaps didn't go so well was with Willie.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, I would say this one did not
Speaker 1: go well at all. For those of you're not familiar,
Speaker 1: I actually never saw the movie. I didn't see the
Speaker 1: movie in there, I can't picture the whale. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like jumping over some rocks and there's like a child
Speaker 1: involved killer well right free daily as a killer roll. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so yeah, the whale in the movie like gets
Speaker 1: to go free. And then people were like, hey, we
Speaker 1: want the real whale to go free. That's not fair
Speaker 1: that this whale played a free whale and it's a
Speaker 1: captive whale or whatever, right right, right, So that makes
Speaker 1: sense on a on a basic level. Yeah, but the
Speaker 1: thing is that they can't They normally cannot release a
Speaker 1: whale back into the wild unless it is physically and
Speaker 1: mentally able um to survive in the wild. Remember, these
Speaker 1: are very social animals, so it's not like it just
Speaker 1: needs to it's it. It needs a it needs to
Speaker 1: know how to find food. But it also needs to
Speaker 1: be able to get along with other killer whales. It
Speaker 1: needs to join a you know, a pot of killer
Speaker 1: whales and thrive. So it needs to be accepted by
Speaker 1: those whales. Um. So this was it has some stigma
Speaker 1: attached shit. And so yeah, following all the public clamor
Speaker 1: over this, uh, they ended up for leasing the whale,
Speaker 1: whose name is Kiko. I believe it's k e I
Speaker 1: k O pronounced it how you will. But yeah, so
Speaker 1: people clamored. They ended up saying, all right, they released
Speaker 1: the poor guy. And Bossert himself was a was a
Speaker 1: critic of releasing this animal. And he described what because
Speaker 1: it wasn't ready to be really, he was the animal
Speaker 1: wasn't ready to be rereleased into the wild. And he
Speaker 1: said it was like basically like a gold big golden retriever.
Speaker 1: Like all this animal wanted to do was come up
Speaker 1: to a human, open its mouth and have the human
Speaker 1: scratch its tongue, which is no, that's what's what Apparently
Speaker 1: they like to have their tongue scratch. But that's all
Speaker 1: well and good in the confines of like a sea
Speaker 1: world environment or something, you know, but out in the wild,
Speaker 1: scratch it right. And and it's important to realize that
Speaker 1: the ocean is a dangerous, dangerous, harsh place, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's most of the earth, you know,
Speaker 1: and uh and and it's it's deadly. So if you
Speaker 1: if this whale is going out there, it's it's like
Speaker 1: if you release somebody from uh um, you know, some
Speaker 1: sort of I don't know, I'm a magic school house
Speaker 1: and they went out thinking the world is all sunshines
Speaker 1: and wallet inspectors, and you know, you know, the animals
Speaker 1: just not prepared for the real world anymore. So this
Speaker 1: animal ended up going back into the wild, wasn't accepted
Speaker 1: by any any other killer whales, and end up dying
Speaker 1: alone in Iceland. That's proper. That is really sad. Um. Well,
Speaker 1: part of the other problem is is actually a little
Speaker 1: bit more basic. It's it's a lack of funding. So
Speaker 1: we have all these agencies right now that will respond
Speaker 1: to UM a report of a marine mammal stranding, and
Speaker 1: you can find them if you head on over to Noah,
Speaker 1: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and they have a
Speaker 1: division that deals with this exclusively. But anyway, UM, you
Speaker 1: have all these agencies that are you know, prepared to respond,
Speaker 1: but you don't have enough funding. So then it becomes
Speaker 1: a question of how how is that money best spent,
Speaker 1: Because if you're talking about a dolphin, it can cost
Speaker 1: as much as a hundred seventy thousand dollars to rehab
Speaker 1: a single dolphin. UM for something like a seal, a
Speaker 1: sea lion, or a walrus, maybe it's a little cheaper,
Speaker 1: maybe you get four dollars, maybe get fifty dollars. It's
Speaker 1: a huge range, um, But this is the kind of
Speaker 1: funding that they were talking about in uh the online
Speaker 1: magazine for woods Hole they were they wrote an article
Speaker 1: dealing with this. I mean, yeah, and it comes down
Speaker 1: to is is it worth the money? Is it worth
Speaker 1: the time? I mean, in many cases, you know, through
Speaker 1: rehabilitation we learn more about the animals. There's and there's
Speaker 1: a lot to be said for that. But take the
Speaker 1: case of C six, which was a forty year old dolphin.
Speaker 1: Forty years that's an old dolphin, all right, just covered
Speaker 1: with scars from from altercations with with bull sharks. All right,
Speaker 1: This is you know, a rug rugged, rough animal washes up,
Speaker 1: all right, undergoes four months of rebuility, rehabilitation. Really they
Speaker 1: finally released the animal back into the wild. Ninety three
Speaker 1: days later, he chokes on a fish an invasive species
Speaker 1: um by the way, but but ends up choking on
Speaker 1: a fish and dies. So I mean the big ethical
Speaker 1: question is in what in which cases are we saving
Speaker 1: the animal more for us than for the animal's own good,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean absolutely selfishly, I can say if
Speaker 1: I were in that situation of looking at a dying
Speaker 1: animal on the beach, I would make every effort to
Speaker 1: preserve the life if I could, you know, if it
Speaker 1: involves like pushing some poor dolphin back into the ocean,
Speaker 1: and then but is that the right response? Not necessarily
Speaker 1: because I mean the free Willy example, there's an example
Speaker 1: of them in the best of intentions there people just
Speaker 1: wanted a whale to be free. But you know if
Speaker 1: I think that was the case where it was ultimately
Speaker 1: more about what we wanted than what was good for
Speaker 1: the whale. And you know, in most of these an
Speaker 1: a lot of these animals, especially in the single beachings,
Speaker 1: I mean, they're dying. This is a dying animal. You know,
Speaker 1: it's kind of you've got to close the book sometimes.
Speaker 1: But there's not really no there's not really any right
Speaker 1: or wrong answer here. It's just more of an ethical
Speaker 1: quandram so on that uplifting note. If you have any
Speaker 1: questions about marine mammal strandings, shoot us an email at
Speaker 1: science Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or in
Speaker 1: the meantime, you can check out some articles like what
Speaker 1: Happens when a Whale Dies by Christine Conger and we
Speaker 1: got blogs you wrote about this on the run. Yeah,
Speaker 1: actually I covered this initially on the blogs a couple
Speaker 1: of posts on whales, So yeah, I come check check
Speaker 1: out the blogs and see what what kind of topics
Speaker 1: are fresh in our minds. For more on this and
Speaker 1: thousands of other topics, is a how stuff works dot Com.
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