An 18-meter-long sperm whale died after becoming stranded for a second time on a beach in Bali Island, Indonesia, despite having been pushed back into the sea by locals and authorities, according to local reports.
The whale was first spotted stranded on Lepang Beach in Bali’s Klungkung regency at 4:30 a.m. local time on April 5, with wounds on its body. Locals and officials tried to save the whale by pushing it back to the sea.
But after being returned to the ocean, the whale once again washed ashore at about 1:30 p.m. on a different beach—Yeh Maleh Beach in Bali’s Karangasem regency—and ultimately died.
Authorities have not yet determined the whale’s sex due to its position. Local marine official Permana Yudiarso said a necropsy would be carried out to determine the cause of death before the carcass was buried.
Yudiarso said that police have cordoned off the area to control the crowds and prevent theft of the whale’s meat or other body parts, according to a Bali Canal, a Bali-based news agency.
According to the agency’s earlier report, local authorities said the whale’s wound may have resulted from being hit by rocks or coral in shallow waters.
“The whale looked like it was dying when discovered this morning but could still be pushed back to the sea amid the rising tide from the east. The cause of death is not yet known,” Yudiarso told reporters.
Solar Storms Contribute to Whale Strandings
According to a 2020 study published in Current Biology, researchers found that increased radio frequency disturbance generated by solar storms may interfere with whales’ navigation, causing them to become stranded.The study, led by Duke University biologist Jesse Granger, examined 186 live strandings of gray whales reported between 1985 to 2018, in which the whales had “no signs of injury, illness, emaciation, or human interaction.”
“Our results suggest that the increase in strandings under high solar activity is best explained by an effect on the sensor, not on the magnetic field itself,” the researchers said in the report.
According to the report, sunspots occur when the sun emits high-energy particles that modify the geomagnetic field and thus have the potential to disrupt magnetic orientation.
“Is it that the solar storms are pushing the magnetic field around and giving the whales incorrect information—for example, the whale thinks it is on 4th Street, but it is actually on 8th?” Granger said in a press release about the study. “Or is it that the solar storms are messing up the receptor itself—the whale thinks it is on 4th Street but has just gone blind?”
Granger said the whales are not receiving inaccurate information but that their magnetic sensors are not working properly to interpret the information.
“So, to put this back into the earlier metaphor, the big secondary finding of this paper is that it is possible that the reason the whales are stranding so much more often when there are solar storms is because they have gone blind, rather than that their internal GPS is giving them false information,” Granger added.
The report found that whale strandings occurred more often on days with high sunspot counts but not on days with large deviations in the magnetic field.
“I really thought that the cause of the strandings was going to be inaccurate information,” Granger said. “When those results came up negative, I was flummoxed.”
“It wasn’t until one of my co-authors mentioned that solar storms also produce high amounts of radio-frequency noise, and I remembered that radio-frequency noise can disrupt magnetic orientation, that things finally started to click together,” she added.
Granger said that while solar storms may contribute to whale strandings, there are many other factors to consider, such as midfrequency naval sonar.
