Whale carcasses will be left to rot

26 Jan 2009, 12:09 pm   -   Source: AAP
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The carcasses of 48 sperm whales that became stranded on a sandbar off Tasmania's northwest coast will only be removed if there's a threat to human health.

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The carcasses of 48 sperm whales that became stranded on a remote sandbar off Tasmania's northwest coast will only be removed if there's a threat to human health, authorities say.

The mammals, mostly mothers and calves, beached themselves on Perkins Island near Smithton on Thursday night.

Most were declared dead within hours of beaching but a couple survived until the weekend, the last one dying on Sunday evening.

Tasmania's Department of Primary Industries and Water said the whales would be left to decompose naturally as the area was remote and would be unlikely to affect the nearest population centres.

"A lot of areas of our coastline are fairly remote and normal practice is to leave them on-site," department spokesman Warwick Brennan told AAP.

"The bodies will go through the process of breaking down and with the ocean washing over them, this can happen quite quickly.

"Unless there is any impact on human health, they will not be moved. Smithton is the nearest place down the river and several surrounding businesses have been spoken to, but so far no concerns have been identified."

The area near the stranding is full of shallow water and sandbars, which frustrated efforts to rescue the whales or retrieve the bodies, Mr Brennan said on Monday.

"They ended up on a sandbar off an island - trying to get any sort of heavy machinery out there to remove the bodies is pretty impossible," he added.

Thursday's beachings follow similar strandings off the state's west and northwest coastlines in November when as many as 200 pilot whales became marooned.

While most of those whales also perished, Tasmanian Parks Service and Primary Industries staff and volunteers managed to save a handful, including five that were fitted with satellite tracking devices before being successfully returned to deeper water.

Mr Brennan said the pilot whales that survived showed that saving stranded whales was viable.

"Those that were fitted with tracking devices, those devices have since stopped working but we got several weeks' worth of data from them, which is very valuable," he said.

"It's really encouraging for everyone working at these kinds of strandings, to know that it is possible to save the whales. We do plan things for these types of events.

"There will be more strandings in future but we will look at what we have learnt and look at what we can plan for. When whales do strand, we'll know if we can get them back in the water."

The Department of Primary Industries and Water has set up a whale hotline to report strandings, 0427 WHALES (0427 942 537).

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