Cetacean strandings occur more often in spring: study

BEIJING. Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Chinese researchers have discovered that the cetacean strandings occurred more frequently in spring over the past 70 years.

The researchers from the Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering of the Chinese Academy of Sciences established a dataset by collating all available records of cetacean strandings along more than 30,000 km coastline of China over seven decades and studied the species diversity and spatiotemporal patterns.

Between 1950 and 2018, a total of 1,763 cetacean strandings were recorded across 36 cetacean species from eight families, according to the recent research article published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

In quantity, 89.9 percent of total cetacean strandings happened among Odontocete species.

The cetacean strandings increased by year from 1950 to 2018 and occurred in all months, while a seasonal pattern could be observed with 38.5 percent reports between March and June.

Stranding data can provide conservation-valuable information on cetaceans over a long time and large space. The new findings are expected to serve conservation and management of cetaceans.