Whales have continued to wash up on Ghana's beaches, and a proper investigation needs to be done to find out why, an environmental group says.
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Environment group calls for proper investigation into whales still washing up
Whales are continuing to wash up on Ghana beaches, around 30 of the dead mammals have been discovered since 2009, which an environmental group says raises serious questions.
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Friends of the Nation have been campaigning for the government to look into a phenomenon of whale carcasses washing up on Ghana's shores since 2012.
This was after noting a significant number of dead whales had washed up since 2009, “in a very suspicious manner,” Friends of the Nation programme manager Kyei Kwadwo Yamoah said.
“We have counted close to 30 whales that have washed ashore since 2009 - this raises a lot of issues.”
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They would generally wash up between August to November, which was when they migrated along the coast, he said.
The trend continued last year when three were discovered, and Yamoah feared it would continue in the same period this year.
The pressure was on to find out why it was happening, and how to stop it.
Friends of the Nation (FoN) had petitioned the government to look into the issue, the Environmental Protection Agency did, but FoN did not accept the investigation was done properly.
The Environmental Protection Agency's August 2014 report took into account observations during a field survey, review of relevant publications, and interviews with individuals and the coastal communities where the whales were found.
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It said the cause could be down to whales being hit by vessels, being entangled with fishing gear and ingestion of marine debris (e.g. polyethylene). However, it said a lack of adequate data and the fact that most of the cetaceans that beached in Ghana were considerably decomposed did not afford definite conclusions about specific causative factors.
“We're not too satisfied by investigations into the matter or the findings. The findings pointed to illegal fishing contributing to the deaths,” Yamoah told Pulse.com.gh in response to the report.
They were only washing up in the Western Region, which is where oil and gas exploration has been taking place. He said there needed to be a proper investigation to see if that was linked.
While the report noted seismic activities could lead to increased cetacean mortality and proposed ways to mitigate this, Yamoah wanted to know if those mitigations were in place, or worked.
He called on the government to further look into it rather than “doing interviews and drawing up conclusions”.
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“We thought there could have been more to it than that and we contested the findings. We realised no scientific study was done, it was just interviews with people who have perceptions. We thought that should not be the trend, we should at least analyse some of these whales that were washed ashore.”
Yamoah said there could be a range of factors contributing to the deaths.
“We know that some of them could be colliding with vessels some of them could be dying from natural causes and diseases, they also could be affected by pollution...There were also issues of the exploration of oil and gas and the use of seismic exploration that has globally and scientifically been proven to be having impact of fisheries.
“There could also be issues of illegal fishing as well. These are the combination of factors that could contribute to the whales washing ashore and the survey team should have approached it with a wider scope.”
Friends of the Nation was calling on the government to properly research the root cause to be able to stop the whales washing up dead.
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