Between Thursday 10 and Friday 11 December a  pod of seven sperm whales stranded on the coast of the Gargano Peninsula (Italy), in the Southern Adriatic Sea.  The animals – including several males of 10+ m - are scattered along a stretch of about six km of beach; five have already died.  Bystanders reported that two more animals were able to regain deep waters, however this is currently unconfirmed.

Mass strandings of sperm whales are extremely rare in the Mediterranean, and limited to ancient times.  These include a stranding of 16, reported near Mazzara del Vallo (Sicily) in 1734, and a stranding of six occurred near Cittanova d’Istria, northern Adriatic Sea, in 1853. 

Scientists from the Centro Studi Cetacei, the Natural History Museum of Milan, and the Italian universities of Bari, Padua (Sandro Mazzariol, also member of the ACCOBAMS emergency task force), Pavia, Siena, and Las Palmas (Spain), among others, are on site since this morning and coordinate operations and scientific analyses.  Necropsies will hopefully help determining whether such atypical stranding might be connected with the presence of specific human activities likely to be hazardous to cetaceans in the area.

Some photos of the mass stranding event, taken on Saturday 12th between 10:45 AM and 1:45 PM, can be viewed from the web page below: