Excerpt from the linked piece by Tess McClure, 10 October 2022:
About 250 whales got here ashore at Pitt Island/Rangiauria within the second stranding, taking the overall variety of whales stranded on the Chatham Islands to round 500, the overall supervisor of Challenge Jonah, Daren Grover, mentioned on Monday. The undertaking runs a stranding hotline and mobilises marine rescues.
Due to the isolation of the Chatham Islands and an energetic shark inhabitants, it’s thought-about too harmful to actively refloat stranded whales. Except they’re naturally refloated by the tides, all of them will die.
The explanations behind mass pilot whale strandings aren’t clear. The Division of Conservation describes the species as “prolific stranders”. The New Zealand strandings come lower than a month after about 200 pilot whales died on the coast of Tasmania.