Seven sperm whales got lost in the Adriatic. Why?

Mass strandings are always mysterious events, and so is the one that happened in 2009 in the Mediterranean, a quite unusual area for this phenomenon. Seven sperm whales apparently took the same “wrong way” into the Adriatic Sea, as previously reported.
A large team of researchers studied the dead animals with a multidisciplinary approach. What caused them to strand? A disease, an impairment of the navigation and echo-location system? Acoustic dead zones? Noise pollution, or environmental contaminants?
A new scientific paper was published with the results of postmortem investigations and a detailed analyses of the geographical and historical background.

ITA: Pubblicato un lavoro scientifico sul misterioso quanto inconsueto spiaggiamento di massa di capodogli in Adriatico, nel 2009. Quali le cause? Un vasto team di ricercatori ha cercato di dare una risposta al quesito, con un approccio multidisciplinare.
M.J.
foto di Michela Podestà

Sandro Mazzariol, Giovanni Di Guardo, Antonio Petrella, Letizia Marsili, Cristina M. Fossi, Claudio Leonzio, Nicola Zizzo, Salvatrice Vizzini, Stefania Gaspari, Gianni Pavan, Michela Podestà, Fulvio Garibaldi, Margherita Ferrante, Chiara Copat, Donato Traversa, Federica Marcer, Sabina Airoldi, Alexandros Frantzis, Yara De Bernaldo Quirós, Bruno Cozzi, Antonio Fernández
(2011) Sometimes Sperm Whales (Physeter macrocephalus) Cannot Find Their Way Back to the High Seas: A Multidisciplinary Study on a Mass Stranding.
PLoS ONE 6(5): e19417. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0019417
Read the article