A few weeks ago, an email arrived from the Marine Mammals Consortium, the kind of routine update I usually skim and file away. This one had a link to a global database of blue whale strandings, and out of curiosity I clicked it. A world map loaded, dotted with blue circles, and my eyes went straight to the western coast of India, which was covered with them.
I grew up in western India, close enough to the sea that the beach was simply part of the week. Almost every weekend we went to Dumas, and in all those years I never once heard anyone mention a whale. Whales belonged in documentaries and in other people’s oceans, somewhere cold and far away.
Yet here was a map telling me that for more than a century, the largest animals ever to have lived had been washing up dead on the coast I thought I knew.
Something startling
I zoomed in and a rabbit hole opened. One of the records sat near Gavier, just outside Surat, the same place where we go birding every weekend. On February 23, 1963, a blue whale roughly twenty metres long came ashore near Magdalla Port, already badly decomposed, and someone took the trouble to measure its flippers and its lower jaw and write it all down. I have stood on that shoreline with binoculars more times than I can remember, looking for waders and never imagining what had once lain there.
Then I did what I now do with most questions that won’t leave me alone. I downloaded the data, uploaded it to an artificial intelligence (AI) tool, and asked it to show me the trends. The trends were interesting but the thing I couldn’t shake was how wide the gap was between what the records showed and what people on this coast actually know. Growing up, none of us had heard that whales strand on India’s coast, and most people I meet still don’t know it.
The numbers were striking. Of the roughly 470 blue whale strandings recorded worldwide, India accounts for about one in seven, and three-quarters of those are along its west coast. Recorded strandings have become more frequent in recent decades. A growing share of the animals are also calves, some less than ten meters long.
Then I noticed something startling: my home state of Gujarat was once one of the main places in India where blue whales were recorded, with fifteen blue whale strandings on record, fourteen of them in the twentieth century and many of them in the Gulf of Khambhat and along the river mouths near Surat. But after 2000, there was just one.
A story in the fragments
At first, I wondered whether the whales had simply stopped coming. But when I looked at where the records came from, a different story took shape. Nine of those 15 records trace back to just two moments when someone was paying close attention: S.T. Moses, a naturalist in Baroda who compiled whale strandings in the 1940s, and a single compilation of Gujarat records published in 2001. After that, unfortunately, no one seems to have been systematically recording Gujarat’s whales.
So when I started searching online, the whales began to reappear. A 2016 news report noted in passing that Gujarat had had at least two whale strandings that year, in May and July, one of them a blue whale — and that animal is nowhere in the global database. A 2016 report by the Konkan Cetacean Research Team to the International Whaling Commission listed a Bryde’s whale that had washed ashore at Dwarka beach on April 12, 2016, and an unidentified baleen whale, possibly another Bryde’s, near Mandvi in the Gulf of Kachchh a month later.
A short technical note from the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute described a dead Bryde’s whale about 10.4 metres long and weighing roughly seven tonnes on the beach at Veraval in August 2017, known locally as “Machchh”. It had been towed ashore under the supervision of forest officials for a post-mortem before being buried on the beach. None of these incidents became stories that the rest of the country got to hear about.
Closer to home, in August 2023, a Bryde’s whale calf was stranded near Mor village in the Olpad taluka of Surat, not far from the beaches I grew up on. Young men from the village dug a large pit, filled it with seawater, and kept the calf in it while they called the forest department and a local NGO. It was released with the help of a bulldozer at high tide, but the sea pushed it back to shore, and a veterinarian declared it dead. It made a brief appearance in the news and then disappeared.
What these fragments tell me is that Gujarat’s coast was never entirely quiet. Its fishers certainly know. Fishers interviewed in Mandvi and Porbandar for that same report said they see whales through the year, more often between October and April, and they call baleen whales “Maccha Raja”, ‘the king of all fish’, whose appearance on a fishing trip is taken as a good omen. The whales are still here. What Gujarat has lost are its watchers: the people and systems that examine and document a carcass on a beach, create a record somewhere, and preserve it so that others can find and read it.
Listen to the whales
This is important work because stranding records are one of the few sources of data about where and when these whales occur along India’s coast, and which offer clues to their distribution, seasonal movements, and population structure that are otherwise very hard to find. Much of what we know about cetaceans off the coasts of India comes from stranding records plus occasional coastal research. With cetacean research in India still in its infancy, data from stranded animals is rightly described as a scientific treasure.
This is also why where people are watching, the picture changes quickly. The Maharashtra coast alone recorded 109 marine mammal strandings in 2020 and 2021, and it is no coincidence that the State today accounts for a large share of India’s recent blue whale records.
In 2015, it was also a team surveying Maharashtra’s coast for humpback dolphins that had reported a blue whale mother and calf about 3 km off the Sindhudurg coast, the first blue whales seen off the State in nearly a century. The whales were found because someone was out there looking.
Gujarat was once one of the main places in India where blue whales were recorded, with fifteen blue whale strandings on record, fourteen of them in the twentieth century and many of them in the Gulf of Khambhat and along the river mouths near Surat. But after 2000, there was just one.
| Photo Credit:
U.S. NOAA
Blue whales are also only the beginning. Of the roughly 120 marine mammal species in the world, 30 to 35 whales, dolphins and porpoises, along with the dugong, are found in the waters around the Indian subcontinent. Most of the recent Gujarat strandings I could find were Bryde’s whales. Further out, surveys across India’s exclusive economic zone between 2003 and 2007 found the Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin to be the most frequently sighted species (across instances) and spinner dolphins the most abundant (in individual instances), with sperm whales also turning up regularly.
In January 2016, more than 100 short-finned pilot whales stranded along a 15 km stretch of Manapad beach in Thoothukudi in Tamil Nadu. Local fishers spent many hours pushing surviving animals back into the sea. In 2021, a false killer whale that washed ashore in Karnataka became the first such stranding recorded in that State.
Perhaps the most remarkable of all is the humpback whale of the Arabian Sea. These whales in other parts of the world undertake the longest migration of any mammal — but those in the Arabian Sea stay put. Genetic studies have suggested that this group became separated from other humpbacks around 70,000 years ago. Researchers believe there are only around a hundred of them remaining, with their songs having been recorded off the coasts of Goa, Karnataka, and Maharashtra. I study elephants by listening to them, so it moves me to know that whales have been singing off the coast where I grew up, and hardly anyone has heard them.
Keep watch
Every cetacean in India is protected under Schedule I of the Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972, which is the same level of protection accorded to tigers and lions. Yet most of us may not recognise a Bryde’s whale on the beach, may not know whom to call, and may never think to ask what happened to it afterwards.
The villagers at Mor did know who to call, and their response is exactly what we need to see along the whole coast. If you find a stranded whale or dolphin, alive or dead, call your local forest department, take photographs, and note where and when you found it, because that record may be the only trace the animal ever leaves among humans.
For anyone curious to learn more, the Marine Mammal Research and Conservation Network of India lists the species found in the country’s waters, explains how to identify them, and what to do at a stranding. It also allows anyone to submit a sighting or stranding record to its online database.
The next time I am home and standing on the mudflats by the sea with my binoculars raised for waders, I will be looking a little further out than I used to. The records say whales have been passing this coast all along, through every weekend of my childhood, and the only reason most of us never knew is that so because few people were keeping an eye out. That part we can change. The whales will keep coming to our shores: let us get out there, watch, and capture what we see.
Seema Lokhandwala is a wildlife biologist and communication co-lead at Coexistence Consortium.
