Whales on the Beach

To residents along the Carolina coast last fall, it looked like an invasion of monsters from the deep. Dozens of pilot whales swam ashore and died on the beaches at Kiawah Island, S.C., and Cape Lookout, N.C. Mentioned by the Roman naturalist Pliny, such suicidal mass strandings of the most intelligent of marine animals have been a persistent puzzle. Now, after completing autopsies on the doomed whales, scientists think that they have the answer.

The beached mammals had no food in their stomachs and were suffering from serious infestations of parasitic worms in their middle ears and sinuses. According to Marine Biologists James G. Mead of the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History in Washington and John H. Prescott of Boston's New England Aquarium, the worms had apparently been taken in along with meals of fish or squid. Once entrenched, they may have interfered with the whales' highly sensitive, sonar-like echo-location system, which enables them to spot schools offish and other objects. The whales' hearing is an essential part of the system, and if it is badly impaired, the scientists say, the whales can neither locate any prey nor avoid hazardous shoals or beaches.

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