New Zealand robs the sharks by allowing the meat from 107 dead pilot whales to rot away on the beach

  

New Zealand’s DoC said that 107 pilot whales died after becoming stranded on a remote island at the bottom of the country’s South Island. Two visitors discovered the whales on Stewart Island yesterday when about half of the animals were still alive, according to a statement on the Department of Conservation’s website. Department workers were forced to kill 48 whales to stop their suffering as dry weather conditions would have prevented a successful rescue attempt, it said.

“With just five people currently on site and the tide on its way out, we saw little hope of keeping the animals alive until enough rescuers could be flown in to assist,” Brent Beaven, biodiversity program manager said in the statement.

The whales will be left to decompose naturally on the beach, robbing the sharks of tons on badly needed protein.

 

When a seaquake-injured pod strands and members start dying off right away, its a strong suggestion that the pod has been at sea for several months.

Two suspicious seaquakes occurred on 27 December 2010:

2010 12 27  152726.54 50.81S 139.24E 10 5.1 mbGS

http://www.emsc-csem.org/Earthquake/earthquake.php?id=204734#scientific

2010 12 27  170232.88 50.81S 139.38E 10 5.6 MwGCMT

http://www.emsc-csem.org/Earthquake/earthquake.php?id=204741#scientific

But we had previously used these two events to explain the restranding of a pod of pilot whales at Farewell Spit (Golden Bay) at the north end of South Island. http://deafwhale.blogspot.com/2011_02_05_archive.html


See news coverage on the Farewell Spit stranding:
http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/refloated-whale-group-strands-again-4013458 

This left us in a quagmire. We could not use the same two seaquakes to explain both strandings since the SEAQUAKE HYPOTHESIS says that the barotrauma knocks out biosonar (navigation) which results in the pod swimming downstream (path of least resistance) with the current from the injury to the stranding beach. For example, if we used the same events, why did the first pod strand on the north end of South Island and the second pod strand on the south end. And why ~12 days between the two strandings? We rechecked our data and found a fourth suspicious event had occurred about ~90 km south of the first two 8 days later on 4 January 2011.    2011 01 04 060604.89 52.08S 139.51E 10 5.1 mbGS

http://www.emsc-csem.org/Earthquake/earthquake.php?id=205418#scientific




Eight days is plenty time to witness a change in the surface currents. Stewart Island is about ~2,200 miles down current from the 4 January event.

 
The 4 January event was further south and 8 days later so it is likely that the Stewart Island pod took a different travel path from the group beached on Farewell Spit (Golden Bay). We also suspect that the Stewart Island pod might have been caught up in a small eddy east of of South Island for a week or so.


NOTE:

My time is still very limited so I am not doing too many advanced predictions right now.  But I promise to start predicting beaching 2 weeks in advance in April. Prediction are tough because they require an almost constant monitoring of the changes in the weather. Of course, not every suspicious seaquake will have a pod of whales above the epicenter so there must allowances made for unknowns. On other hand, connecting seaquakes with a stranding a month later is relatively easy. We are getting to the point now where we know by past experience where to look for seismic activity. More and more evidence indicates that most dangerous seaquakes occur above areas known as volcanic hotspots.