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Cases of beached marine life are a relatively common occurrence on New Zealand’s coastlines. The Department of Conservation responds to an average of 85 strandings per year, officials said, but most of the time this only involves a single animal.

Even so, mass strandings involving large numbers are not out of the ordinary for pilot whales. The largest recorded whale stranding in New Zealand’s history occurred on the Chatham Islands in 1918, when around 1,000 pilot whales came ashore, according to The Guardian.

“Large numbers of pilot whales have been stranding for as long as we know,” Russell Leaper, Whale Researcher at the International Fund for Animal Welfare, told ABC News. “It seems to be a species that is particularly susceptible to these mass strandings of live animals. It’s still a bit of a mystery.”

There are a number of factors that can cause whale strandings. These can include sickness, extreme weather or human interference in the oceans. But in this instance “we can’t attribute it directly to human activities,” Leaper said.

“New Zealand seems to be a prone place to it,” he added. “They do have a lot of long sandy beaches, but nevertheless they do seem to have a lot more of these mass strandings than we’d expect anywhere else.”

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