Thaindian News

March 30, 2010 (Pen Men at Work): Whale experts are baffled with the recent large number deaths of baby whales. About three hundred whales have been found dead in the waters around Peninsula Valdes along Argentina’s Patagonian Coast since 2005. Almost 90 percent of those deaths represent whale calves less than 3 months old, and the calf deaths make up almost a third of all right whale calf sightings in the last five years.

Marcela Uhart, a medical veterinarian with the Wildlife Conservation Society said, “This is the single largest die-off event in terms of numbers and in relation to population size and geographic range,”

International Whaling Commission called for an urgent meeting at a workshop in Puerto Madryn, Argentina to solve the mystery behind these mass deaths of baby whales this month. They are still to come up with something substantial but a few clues that have emerged so far say that the cause of death might be usually thin layers of blubber which was found on some dead calves. But experts at the IWC meeting agreed that it’s unlikely the main cause of death came from killer whale attacks, disturbances from whale-watching boats, vessel strikes or fishing gear entanglement. These last two mortality factors are the main causes contributing to the near extinction of northern right whales near the Eastern U.S

Whale calves typically have lower chances of survival during their first year of life, but the high rate of death at Peninsula Valdes is unique.

Whales nearly went into extinction before 1930s when ban on hunting came into practice. Still, they remain listed as endangered and have yet to recover anywhere close to their historic population levels of 60,000 or more.