On 11 July 2024 at about 10:45am, British Divers Marine Life Rescue (BDMLR) received a report of a mass stranding of long-finned pilot whales on the isle of Sanday in Orkney, Scotland.  They found 77 animals high up the beach, having evidently been stranded for several hours already.  65 of the whales were already dead and the 12 remaining whales were in a poor state.

“Sadly the remaining 12 pilot whales have been euthanized due to their condition deteriorating from the many hours they have spent stranded on the beach,” the BDMLR said in a statement late Thursday.

“Pilot whales are a really social species. They really rely on their family bonds. So, it might have been that just one of them got into difficulty and the rest of the pod just stranded with it because they stick together,” BDMLR rescue and community coordinator Molly Brown told the Reuters news agency. “In moments of need, they never leave each other’s side.”

The BBC suggests that this could be the largest UK mass stranding in nearly 100 years. since 1927 when 126 out of more than 130 false killer whales died in the Dornoch Firth in the Highlands. Larger strandings have taken place in other parts of the world, with the largest in parts of New Zealand and Australia.

Experts from across the UK have arrived in Orkney to carry out examinations and post-mortems on the pod of pilot whales.

Dozens of whales die in mass stranding on beach in Orkney Islands