SA Right Whale Dieoff Update - 90% Of Deaths Calves Under 3 Mos; Largest Loss In Modern Records

[hatrack]

Mass death among baby right whales has experts scrambling to figure out the puzzle behind the largest great whale die-off on record.

Observers have found 308 dead whales 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.

"This is the single largest die-off event in terms of numbers and in relation to population size and geographic range," said Marcela Uhart, a medical veterinarian with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). She represents an associate director in Latin America for the WCS Global Health Program. To get to the bottom of the baby-whale mystery, the scientific committee of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) convened an urgent meeting at a workshop in Puerto Madryn, Argentina, this month.

Only a few clues have emerged so far regarding the cause of death, such as unusually thin layers of blubber on some dead calves. 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.

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Ruling out some factors for the southern right whale deaths leaves possible causes, such as harmful biotoxins created by algae or other organisms, disease, environmental factors at the nursing grounds or lack of prey at the whales' feeding grounds. Official results from the workshop about the cause of death will be released after review and approval at the IWC's annual meeting scheduled to take place in Morocco in June. The last huge die-off for great whales — including all baleen whales and sometimes the sperm whale — took place in the Eastern Pacific from 1999-2000. More than 250 gray whales showed up dead between Alaska and Mexico during that incident.

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http://www.livescience.com/animals/largest-whale-die-off-100329.html

[ensho]

1. horrible and scary - and our govt. acts like nothing is happening

nt