Topical Island

On the 11th of July, I was due to go to a property on the island of Sanday to carry out a repair to an existing satellite dish, to install a further dish and to route some cabling to liven up previously unused tv sockets. A couple of days beforehand, the customer contacted me to say that due to personal circumstances, we would have to reschedule to a later date, and I now anticipate being out there next week.

All this is to explain why I wasn't on Tresness beach the fateful day that 77 Long-finned Pilot Whales mass stranded, resulting in the deaths of the whole mixed-pod group. An appalling tragedy for the creatures themselves and the volunteers, both local and national, who tried to rescue the dozen whales who were still alive when the alarm was raised.

The story was big enough and horrific enough to make the national media outlets, with this newspaper article being one of the more thoughtful examples.

Mass strandings are comparatively rare although, worryingly becoming more frequent, and often it is difficult to unpick the complex reasons why such events occur. Members of the British Divers Marine Life Rescue (BDMLR) team, the Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme (SMASS), and the Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme have all been collecting data (a polite way of saying multiple postmortems) to try to determine the cause(s) of this incident.

It looks like it will take some time before we might know for sure, but I think it's a safe bet that humans are involved. I can't think of a good evolutionary reason why a species would resort to this behaviour, taking multiple individuals and generations out of the gene pool. There will be a reason, we really need to figure out what it is so that we can prevent future occurrences. 

I am minded of the experiment carried out by Charles Darwin during his visit to the Galapagos Islands aboard HMS Beagle. He repeatedly threw a marine iguana into the sea from the rocks where it was basking. The iguana always returned to land, only to be hurled seaward once again by the curious Mr D. He was initially puzzled by this apparent stupidity, but eventually realised (no doubt to the relief of the iguana), that sharks were a bigger threat to the iguanas than a young English naturalist.

The notion that we have filled the oceans with our technological noise shouldn't be a surprise, because as a species we have managed to pollute every environment we have ever visited. It wouldn't be a shock if we had created, however unwittingly, a nightmarish underwater soundscape featuring the cetacean equivalent of constant white noise, or the stadium gig of one's least favourite genre of music played very loudly, or a perpetual "fingernails down the chalkboard" riff. Humans need to evolve some sustainability pronto, we shouldn't require every other living thing on the planet to have to mitigate the torture we casually broadcast everywhere we go.