Nearly 150 dolphins dead in Japan
Print Edition
RESCUERS were forced to abandon efforts to save nearly 150 melon-headed whales that stranded on a beach in Japan yesterday, after frantically trying all day to save them.
As darkness fell, local officials in Hokota, about 100 kilometers northeast of Tokyo, said they had been able to save only three of the 149 animals that had beached and that the rescue effort had been called off.
The rest of the creatures, a member of the dolphin family usually found in the deep ocean, had either died or were dying, they said.
“It was becoming dark and too dangerous to continue the rescue work at this beach, where we could not bring heavy equipment,” said an unnamed Hokota official.
“Many people volunteered to rescue them but the dolphins became very, very weak.”
“Only three of them have been successfully returned to the sea, as far as we can confirm,” he added.
Locals and coastguard teams battled through the day to save the animals, trying to stop their skin from drying out as they lay on the sand.
Others were carried in slings back towards the ocean.
Television footage showed several animals from the large pod had been badly cut, and many had deep gashes.
Some of the creatures were being pushed back onto the beach by the tide soon after being released, despite efforts to return them to the water. “We see one or two whales washing ashore a year, but this may be the first time we have found over 100 of them on a beach,” a coastguard official said.
The pod was stretched out along a roughly 10-kilometre-long stretch of beach in the Ibaraki area, where they were found by locals early yesterday morning. “They are alive. I feel sorry for them,” one man at the scene told public broadcaster NHK, as others ferried buckets of seawater to the stranded animals to pour over them.
Massive efforts were required to get the three that survived back into the water.
Rescuers wrapped them with blankets before putting them on a coastguard vessel. The animals were taken to waters about 10 kilometers from the shore and released, according to NHK.
Footage showed many of the less fortunate animals lying in shallow waters being pushed back and forth by the waves.
While the reason for the beaching was unclear, Tadasu Yamadao, a researcher at the National Museum of Nature and Science, said the dolphins might have got lost.
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