Should Beached Whales Be Rescued?

A 900-pound male Melon-Head whale beached itself on Playlinda Beach in Florida Wednesday and was rescued by a team from Seaworld and transported to Gulf World in Panama. Melon-Head whales live more than 30 miles offshore and rarely find themselves trapped in shallow water. This leads rescuers to conclude that this is most likely the same Melon-Head whale rescued a few days prior in St. Augustine.

A whale's body cannot support itself when not floating in water. When a whale enters shallow water, it runs the risk of getting stuck on the bottom and not being able to maneuver itself back into deeper waters. Without human intervention, the whale will dehydrate in the sun and die. Marine biologists do not yet know definitively why a whale, that normally has a finely tuned sense of direction, would swim in dangerously shallow waters in the first place. Theories abound including illness, dementia, and simply a bad sense of direction. These theories gain more weight when it is factored in that many beached whales re-beach themselves shortly after rescue. Incidences of mass beachings may indicate interference by ship sonar near the whales' feeding and breeding grounds which confuses their sense of direction. Much more work needs to be done to determine the effect of human-generated sonar on whale sonar.