MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Grim experience for Australian authorities, euthanizing and disposing of some 400 whale carcasses

Rescuers had managed to free almost 90 of the long-finned pilot whales beached off the country’s remote southern coast by late Thursday.

Australian officials were focusing on the grim task of disposing of almost 400 whale carcasses on Thursday, while attempts to rescue the few remaining survivors of one of the world’s worst mass strandings were expected to extend another day.

Rescuers had managed to free almost 90 of the long-finned pilot whales beached off the country’s remote southern coast by late Thursday.

The majority of those freed had reached deeper water, officials said, but four had to be euthanized and others might return when the tide turns.

The clock was ticking for a small group of whales still floundering in shallow water on a wide sandbank, four days after the 470-strong pod was first spotted off the northwest coast of the island state of Tasmania.

“There is a likelihood that we will be continuing the rescue efforts tomorrow,” said Nic Deka, the incident controller for the state government’s Parks and Wildlife Service.

“While we have live animals that have a chance and we have the crew to shift them, we will give it a go,” he told a media briefing.

After a positive veterinary assessment, a rescue attempt would continue on Friday for a mother and calf that appeared in footage posted by local media on Twitter. The video showed the calf swimming among rescuers as they tried to save its mother.

Alongside these measures, authorities were also developing a plan to dispose of around dead 380 whales at sea.

Options included loading the carcasses onto a barge or gathering them into a group to tow, Deka said, adding that a barge with a crane attached was due to arrive on Monday.

“Realistically it could take several days. We are intending to start tomorrow. If we get a method that works efficiently it may be by early next week we will have made a real dent.”

Euthanizing those animals too exhausted to swim to safety was another daunting but necessary task, experts said.

“For large whales, very sadly, it could take weeks for them to die, and they get blistered in the sun, so you would be thinking about an ethical and humane thing to do,” Mike Double, a zoologist that leads the Australian Marine Mammal Centre, said.

While larger whales can require a lethal dose of potassium chloride to the heart or explosives, smaller whales like the long-finned pilots are usually shot with a firearm.