SUICIDE - Why do whales beach themselves???!!! WHY?

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Right. I was just speculating that maybe they are already sick or hurting before they beach. I was just wondering if there is some instinctive response to head for land, although it's also odd that they are also seen heading toward fresh water. I do suppose that they usually die at sea, but since the act of beaching seems more driven than just being lost, I was speculating that perhaps there is an instinct behind it.

 

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Yes, whales have always beached themselves, whales are very intelligent and emotional creatures, and some close relatives are very social, lots of true whales actually are quite social. Just on a long scale through their songs and what not. And I think an animal that is social and is intellgent enough to feel. They can also feel depressed and also, have suicidal thoughts, and subsequently would be intellegent enough to beach themselves.

 

The cause of whales beaching themselves might be a whole lot of things.

However, we have almost no data bearing on this problem at all, in order to forumlate, let alone test, any hypothesis.

What data we do have, from marine mammal stranding stations around the world, does not seem to evince any patterns at all - no common factors.

There is no data that suggest these strandings are getting any more common - they are just much better reported today than 100 years ago.

There is some data to suggest that the abundance of whale skeletons in the fossil record, particularly from the Miocene on (about the last 25 million years) may be a reflection of the same stranding phenomenon.

Rich

 

The OP is not buying it, but not selling it either.
The data points instead to a yet to be determined cause.

By correlating the locations of beaching on a large world map, perhaps one could see some patterns related to man-made causes. Or perhaps patterns of past migration pathways programmed, but no longer able to traverse, because of the ongoing crustal movements of continental drift.

 

There has been very little change in the continents since long before the Miocene - and since the begining of the Miocene, the only major change has been the opening of the land bridge between North and South America.

But yes, mapping may show a pattern (but hasn't so far); autopsies don't seem to show any consistent pathologies, and the strandings don't seem to be related to major shipping corridors.

Rich

 

Why do whales beach themselves? BAROSINUSITIS!

Barotrauma in the air sinuses of their heads is the cause of 90% of all strandings of marine mammals worldwide. Barosinusitis is a diving-related injury caused by exposure to rapid and excessive changes in the surrounding water pressure during a dive.

Since the air sinuses serve a major function in both sound production and reception, a whale, or a family of whales, suffering from barosinusitis would lose their sense of direction

Assume that some sort of upheaval, like a navy sonar or other high-energy acoustic device, seismic airgun array, explosion, undersea earthquake, volcanic eruption, or meteorite impact has happen and caused a series of severe pressure oscillations in the water surrounding a family of diving whales. If exposed to rapidly changing external pressure while diving, the air in their heads will expand and contract in direct proportion to the changing water pressure (Boyle's Gas Law). The volume of air in the sinuses could easily be squeezed to 1/4th normal volume as the pressure phase crosses over them. When the vacuum phase passes a microsecond later, the volume of air in the sinuses would quadruple.

Assuming the frequency of these pressure oscillations at 10 cycles per second, and the duration of disturbance at 15 seconds, the volume of air in the sinuses would bounce back and forth from a 400% increase to a 400% decrease, 10 times per second for 15 seconds (150 times in 15 seconds). Because the air in the enclosed air spaces compresses and expands rapidly during the passing of the disturbance, while bodily tissues, blood, and bones do not, strong pressure differentials develop at air-filled interfaces causing shear forces that tear, bruise, and disrupt tissues, membranes, and small blood vessels. The sinuses might then fill up with blood and the air escape into the surrounding tissues. When such a disaster happens to a pod, each whale loses its ability to dive and feed itself along with its sense of direction.

It also stands to reason that a pod of lost, injured whales would group together on the surface for protection against sharks. The question is: where would the average man expect to encounter a pod of whales suffering from barosinusitis? The simple answer is on the beach.

If the water was calm like the surface of a small pod, the lost pod would swim in random directions, like a group of lost people wandering around on a desert. But the dynamic ocean is rarely calm. Surface currents would present much greater resistance when the lost whales tried to swim in any directions except downstream. It's the path of least resistance—always taken by lost objects moving through a system. For example, water flowing downhill follows the path of least resistance. Storms travel on the path of least resistance by flowing toward zones of low barometric pressure, where lower air density offers less impedance than does higher pressure zones.

Thus, without a sense of direction, and no land marks to guide them, the lost pod will always swim downstream with the flow of the surface currents.

The current might guide them into the open sea, in which case the average man would never see them. On the other hand, the surface currents might also guide them towards land, in which case they would eventually swim into a beach. Why a beach? Because the current guiding the whales is the same energy that carried each grain of sand to build the beach in the first place. Wherever current washes ashore, you find a beach, along with seaweed, plastic jugs, coconuts, and beached whales. Where current does not wash ashore you find rocks and no flotsam and no stranded whales.

David Williams

 

Incorrect. All directions are as easy to swim in no matter what the current. The whale will cover more ground swimming with the current than against it, of course. But just as a pilot cannot tell which direction the wind is coming from without instruments or ground measurements, so the whale cannot tell which direction the current is coming from.

The net current flowing into land is zero. The only exceptions to this are openings in that land (which of course really isn't land.) Things like river mouths which cause a current away from a beach or the opening of an estuary that causes an inward current during a rising tide.

 

I also agree that man made machines emit radio signals that confuse them