THE TRUTH ABOUT WHY WHALES MASS STRAND

notice all the seaweed washed ashore by the current -- the current also washed the lost whales to the same beach by Capt. David Williams read the real reason all whales mass strand I'm a retired sea captain with 50 years of ocean-going experience. I struggled during all those years to understand why pods of whales beached themselves. The only thing that made sense was that they had lost their acoustic sense of direction and swam down current in the path of least drag. This was a no-brainer for me because everything lost at sea floats or swims downstream ─ all sea captains know this. If someone falls off your vessel at night, you always look down current -- never up current. To make it even more of a no-brainer, every sea captain knows that the flow of the current washes sand ashore to build beaches so it just made a lot of sense to me that lost whales would end up on sandy beaches. To boot, the beach was where people hung out. If there are no beaches, there are no ...

Judique, St. George's Bay, Nova Scotia :  On 4 August 2015, 16 pilot whales from a larger pod of about 35 stranded. Eight died. Linden MacIntyre, a former journalist who lives about a kilometre from the site in Judique, said he believes the whales originally beached at McKay's Point, Inverness County, as the tide washed out from under them  sometime early Tuesday morning . ( link ) The clue ( as the tide washed out from under them ) indicates that the whales guided by the incoming tide to the edge of high water mark and lingered there until the tide dropped from under them. They were then considered stranded. This is exactly what should be expected from an entire pod that had lost its acoustic sense of direction. The same appears true in the picture below. You can see the high tide mark near the grass. These whales were guided slowing to the shore as the tide was rising until they could swim no closer. Then, as the tide dropped and the water flow from under them, t...