‘We’ve got to do right by these animals’: Unpicking the mystery of the 77 beached whales

The whales’ hearing may well be key to understanding what went wrong. “This is a species that uses sound to communicate, to find food, to navigate, for all of the basic life processes,” explains Dr Brownlow, “so if there’s something up with the hearing or their ability to echo-locate then that could be majorly important. If there’s been an excessive noise or protracted amounts of noise then cells in the auditory apparatus can become damaged: they don’t repair – and you can detect that damage at post-mortem.

“But the problem is, there are a huge range of behavioural responses to noise or disturbance, both human and natural – be it earthquakes or killer whales or the usual suspects like sonar, military activity, pile-driving, or detonation of explosives – and not all the ways a socially complex animal responds to those can be detected at post-mortem. You can’t detect if it’s scared, if it’s lost, if it’s made a bad decision.”

Dr Brownlow’s team is now pulling in information from as wide a number of sources as possible – “from the military, from buoys, from records of underwater logs” – to get a handle on whether there has been a notable increase in noise. But while those investigations are under way, the stranding also presents a huge logistical problem: how to dispose of around 50 tons of whale carcasses?

“These animals are a really important part of the marine ecosystem and actually the best thing that we can do, where possible, is to bury them close to the sea,” explains Dr Brownlow. “I think the only option is to use a digger so they can be buried in the fields beside the coast, where they’ll be piled up and covered in sand. They’ll very quickly decompose so the nutrients go back into the marine environment.”

Once the practicalities have been attended to, the task ahead for Dr Brownlow and his team will be one of critical importance, if the UK is to avoid more mass beachings in the coming years.

“The biggest mass stranding event we had seen in Scotland was last year in Lewis and that was 55 animals,” he says. “Now, a year later, we’re here again with another case; this time 77 animals have died because of being stranded or being euthanised for welfare reasons.

“The human relationship with cetaceans is very curious and very powerful,” he adds. “They are social, highly complex beings that have an advanced social structure and communication. They are clearly intelligent. I think people feel a connection with them in the way they do with other highly intelligent animals, such as elephants and primates.

“We’ve got to do right by these animals. We’ve got to do something to try to stop this.”