A reflection on the Waterford/Western Scotland Sperm whale
Last month we wrote about the sperm whale in Waterford Estuary on March 25th which after spending the day in the shallows around Arthurstown left the estuary that same evening on a falling tide. A week later on April 1st Scottish fishermen saw it around Little Cumbrae in the Firth of Clyde and it tracked north to the Isle of Bute on April 8th. It died in Ettrick Bay the following day April 9th. After being reclaimed by the sea for a few days, a brief examination on April 12th by BDMLR volunteers revealed it to be a male measuring approximately 16.5 mts. Its heavily worn teeth suggesting it was an old solitary bull that had survived many a battle with equally deep-diving giant squid in the trench warfare of the Atlantic’s deep gullies.
This story attracted an enormous audience on social media with a combined 1.1 million “views” spread across the three reports posted on www.iwdg.ie and shared across our social media. Yes, the IWDG could help fill in a few blanks in the chronology of events, but the central character won over the hearts and minds of a lot of people, who willed it back out to the safety of deeper water between the Hook and Dunmore East; only to vanish and then resurface after travelling a minimum distance of 500 km from the Celtic Sea, presumably north through the Irish Sea and into the Scottish Western isles. The story clearly had elements that readers found compelling, making it more like an epic or a Norse saga than just another account of a stranded whale on a beach.
For many it raised more questions than we could offer answers to. In cases like this, there are rarely satisfactory explanations as to why a deep diving large whale, or any type of whale, would intentionally put itself in a situation where it was most likely going to strand and suffer the consequences that must surely follow. The first great naturalist Pliny the Elder in ancient times asked himself the very same question 2,000 years ago on the shores of the Aegean Sea, after observing dolphins beaching themselves on the shore.
In the case of cetaceans the only real way of answering the big “WHY” question is by establishing the cause of death, which can really only be done by a marine mammal pathologist carrying out a necropsy (or post mortem). In the case of large whales, this will often be impossible due to their sheer size and resultant complicated logistics, i.e. difficulty of access to the carcass. For instance, unless the body can be removed above the high-water line, then the team will be unable to do much more than a cursory examination, before the tide returns to swamp the site and potentially take the carcass back out to sea. Although such brief examinations may be useful if the cause of death is anthropogenic (man-made) with obvious lesions or traumas from events such as ship strike or entanglement in fishing gear, they’ll generally not reveal much if an animal is sick or has an underlying medical condition. It is within this vacuum that we can over-speculate and it does no harm to remind ourselves that most whales die of natural causes after presumably long and healthy lives.
So, what of our 2025 season thus far?
Although we had a wee flurry of early season humpbacks off the Mullett Peninsula, Co. Mayo in mid-March, these seem to have been an outlier, as over the past month up to time of writing (April 24th) there have been no further humpback sightings. But we need to remind ourselves that it’s still the humpback breeding season and presumably a chunk of the animals destined for our coastal feeding area are still down in warmer climes, with things other than food on their mind!
So, at this early stage in the whale season, the sightings landscape has been dominated by the minke whale with just over 40% of the 52 minke sightings coming from Co. Cork. The biggest group thus far was recorded by the Bristow Ireland Search and Rescue helicopter who recorded around 15 minkes feeding in Donegal Bay on April 10th.
Basking shark with splash tag deployed by researchers in Southern Brittany, now in Irish South coast © APECS
2025 is shaping up to be another strong year for basking sharks with 117 records at time of writing, which is identical to our shark records for the same period in 2024. So far, the strongest showing is from the southwest with 50% of records coming from Counties Cork and Kerry. On April 24th we received an interesting email from Alexandra Rohr from the French shark research group APECS saying….. “We deployed a splash tag on a basking shark on April 7th 2025 in Les Glénan archipelago in southern Brittany, France and its latest satellite ping places it off Tramore, Co. Waterford this morning April 24th”. We’ve established that its transponder actually first pinged off Power Head in East Cork on April 19th, which is a distance of some 560 KM over 12 days, suggesting an average 46 KM travelled per day.
Whoever would have thought that Waterford’s coast could play such an important role in the lives of these two very different species of leviathan, the sperm whale and basking shark?
As always, once we receive your cetacean or basking shark sightings, we validate them in as close to real time as possible, so you can browse them straight away on your PC or our Reporting App. This often happens within minutes, will generally happen the same day, but there will be times, especially when good weather clashes with weekends, bank holidays (or the sightings officer is taking a few days off), when there will be an unavoidable backlog and it may take longer for your record to appear, but fear not, for appear it will. It is more important that your records get validated first before going live. The fact that you may on occasion see other reports live that supercede yours, simply means that we are putting up a small number of reports to keep things looking fresh. it doesn’t mean your report won’t get seen to or is lost. But if for any reason, you feel a report a report(s) is missing from the system just fire us an email with your name, the date of sighting etc and we’ll chase it up.
As we move towards May, there are two big IWDG events for the diaries. The first of which is Whale Watch Ireland on Saturday 17th May. This free event comprises guided land-based whale watches at 14 headlands or vantage points in all coastal counties. See www.iwdg.ie/events for further details. No bookings necessary.
The following weekend 23-25th May we have the first of our Summer’s Residential Weekend Whale Watching courses in Leap, west Cork. There are still some spaces left and rooms available at the fabulous CECAS Retreat Centre, who are again hosting us. Bookings on Eventbrite.
Pádraig Whooley