PREVIEW

A tragic but remarkable sight occurred on the island of Sanday in Orkney on Thursday (11July2024), when around 100 long-finned pilot whales stranded themselves on a beach.
British Divers Marine Life Rescue’s regional team was immediately mobilised with response equipment to make their way over to the island to try and save the whales.
On arrival, the Medics found there to be about 77 animals high up the beach, having evidently been stranded for several hours already. Sadly, only 12 of them were still alive at this point. They later had to be euthanised due to their condition deteriorating from the many hours they spent stranded on the beach resulting in crush injury from their own weight.
The substrate they were on was also incredibly soft meaning they sunk even deeper into the sand when the tide washed over them, so unfortunately they weren’t able to refloat themselves.
The Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme (SMASS) will attempt to recover as many bodies as possible for post-mortem sampling and examination to try to determine the circumstances of stranding. This is currently unknown as there are no obvious indications as to why they all stranded, and it may be some time before full results are available due to the huge task of conducting these examinations.
BDMLR’s team thanked their volunteer Marine Mammal Medics who attended this incident along with members of the local community for their efforts in “distressing circumstances”.