Andy Slaughter – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Andy Slaughter on 2016-06-08.

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how many whales, dolphins and other aquatic mammals have been beached on British shores in each of the last 10 years.

George Eustice

Defra, in conjunction with the Devolved Administrations of Scotland and Wales, fund the UK Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme (CSIP), which investigates the causes of cetacean strandings around the UK.

Between 2006 and 2014 a total of 4838 cetaceans (whales, dolphins, porpoises) were stranded around the UK (English, Welsh, Scottish, and Northern Ireland) coast. 147 of these were successfully refloated. The 2015 data has not yet been published. This will be available in due course on the CSIP website, where the annual reports for preceding years are already available.

The published annual strandings data, shown below, may also be subject to change where additional strandings information is reported after publication.

Although not part of its formal remit, data on stranded seals has been collected by CSIP in recent years. Since 2010 2185 dead stranded seals have been recorded.