Climate Change Will Bring More Whale Beachings

Don’t you just love the smell of decaying whale while you’re catching some rays on the beach on a hot summer day? Get used to it, because scientists say whale beachings will soon become much more common – particularly in Australia. The reason? Global warming is going to bring their food stock closer to shore.

From Yahoo News (AFP):

Researchers tracking the beaching of whales in the region since 1920 said strandings tended to occur in 12-year cycles which coincided with cooler, nutrient-rich ocean currents moving from the south and swelling fish stocks.

“These animals, most of the time they’re trying to find food, that’s what they do,” said the project’s Corey Bradshaw, from Adelaide University.

“With climate change it is more likely that these kinds of oscillations will be more variable so you get more extreme conditions,” he said. “We could see more and more frequent strandings simply as a function of higher frequency (of) extreme events.”

Whale rescuers are going to have a huge – literally – task ahead of them once this starts happening. What’s really sad is, successful rescues don’t happen as often as animal advocates would like. Even if rescuers manage to get them back in the water in time, many aren’t able to return to deeper waters and must be euthanized. Just another reason to put our all into fighting global warming, as if we were lacking in that department.

Link [Yahoo News]

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