Mumbai--In the first case of ‘live stranding’ in Maharashtra, a 40-feet-long female Blue Whale, the world’s largest animal, washed up on a beach at Alibaug on Wednesday morning. Despite efforts to move the 20-tonne marine animal by local fishermen and Alibaug forest department for more than 10 hours, the whale died ashore around 4am on Thursday, said officials from the forest department.
With the tide, the whale was washed up around 1.5 kilometre onto the beach, said N Vasudevan, chief conservator of forest, mangrove cell. “As the beach was shallow, the whale did not get enough water to survive. Usually, if such a large animal is beached for more than 12 hours, they do not survive, despite the locals and the forest department trying their best to keep it hydrated and using JCB machines to push it back into the sea. A shallow beach meant that the whale had to be taken deep inside, which was not possible,” he said.
The Blue Whale has been buried along the beach above the high tide line. Vasudevan along with Konkan Cetacean Research Team members reached the beach by Wednesday evening. “If we continued to push the animal back, there were increased chances of injury. Also, it seemed like the whale had not been feeding well for the past few weeks,” added Vasudevan.
After failed attempts at rescue, the team took some live tissue from the Blue Whale to identify the right subspecies. The research team had been studying ‘near coastal’ marine mammals off Sindhudurg coast for the past few months.
This stranding comes just months after the team were “surprised” to find a pod of Bryde’s Whale and Blue Whales within 3 km off Sindhudurg coast while studying dolphins in the area. The sightings and their frequency has got forest department officials excited, as the last reported sighting of a Blue whale, one that washed up on the shore, off Maharashtra coast was in 1914.
The team has been surveying the water from Vijaydurg to Redi, near Goa coast, since last May, up to 2.25kms off shore for Indo-Pacific Humpback dolphins. So far, the team has spotted 675 dolphins, identifying 153 individuals.
INDIAN EXPRESS
