After a dead fin whale washed up on a beach in Newquay, Cornwall, this week, experts are now dealing with a logistical challenge: how do you get rid of a carcass weighing several tonnes? And what do you do if it explodes?
Hundreds of whales become stranded along the British coastline each year, and the numbers are rising. Since the Zoological Society of London’s Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme (CSIP) was founded in 1990, it has recorded 17,850 cetacean strandings in the UK. There has been an unusually high number of whale strandings so far this year, including that of a pod of 55 pilot whales that washed up on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland in July in one of the UK’s biggest mass strandings to date.
