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| People look at a dead 13-meter whale shark at Pandansimo beach in Yogyakarta on Thursday. A nine-meter whale shark died early on Saturday morning after it was stranded on a beach in Yogyakarta, making it the second big fish to perish on a South Java beach during the past week. (AP Photo/Slamet Riyadi) |
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Bantul,
Yogyakarta. A nine-meter whale shark died early on Saturday morning after it
was stranded on a beach in Yogyakarta, making it the second big fish to perish
on a South Java beach during the past week.
Ali
Sutanto, an official with the Yogyakarta office of the National Search and
Rescue Agency (Basarnas), said on Saturday that the whale shark was first
spotted at Pelangi beach in Bantul, Yogyakarta, on Friday evening.
“Our post
received a report [of the shark] from the locals at about 7 p.m.,” Ali said, as
quoted by Indonesian news portal tempo.co.
He added
that the shark was initially still a half of kilometer away from the beach, but
at midnight it washed ashore.
“The local
SAR team immediately dispatched our entire 56 members to pull the shark to the
beach. Police at Parangtritis and surrounding areas also helped us,” he said.
Ali said
that rescuers initially tried to pull the huge whale shark toward the beach to
keep it from being battered by waves in the
shallow water.
The shark
was still alive as rescuers finally managed to pull it shoreward, but the big
fish struggled for breath, and died four hours later.
“We tried
to pull it away from the waves all night. But it was difficult; [the shark] was
too heavy,” Ali said. The remains of the shark sat on the beach on Saturday,
drawing hundreds of spectators.
Animal
Friends Jogja said the whale shark was about nine-meters long and two meters in
width.
On
Wednesday, another whale shark that was
13-meters long and weighed 3 tons — among the largest size of the species —
died after it was stranded on Pandansimo beach, also in Yogyakarta.
And on July
28, rescuers managed to return a stranded sperm whale to sea in West Java after
it spent four days trapped on Karawang beach. But the animal was found
dead hours later.
The
International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) regards both whale sharks
and sperm whales as “vulnerable.”
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