Off the north coast of Tasmania, the 14 whales were found beached on King Island earlier this week.
The state’s conservation office has sent biologists and a veterinarian to the small island to conduct an investigation after an aerial inspection turned up no more stranded whales.
Wildlife researcher Kris Carlyon from the state government conservation agency told the nearby Mercury newspaper that the baby whales’ deaths might have been the result of a “misadventure.”
The majority of stranding incidents are caused by misadventure, Carlyon added. “They might have been foraging near the shore, there might have been food, and it’s possible they got caught on a low tide.”
“That is the current theory.”
Probably beaching themselves on Sunday, the whales were brutally murdered on Monday, according to him.
Whale strandings in large numbers were “rare but certainly not unusual” in the area, according to Carlyon, who spoke to The Mercury.
2020 had seen the largest mass stranding in Australia’s history when 470 whales got stuck in the state’s western region.
Despite the efforts of dozens of volunteers who laboured for days in Tasmania’s cold waters to free the pilot whales, more than 300 died during that stranding.
The reason of mass whale strandings is yet unclear, but some
