The Watchers Stopped, Not the Whales: Why Gujarat's Empty Stranding Records Mislead

Protected in Law, Missing from the Record

The commitment is as strong as Indian wildlife law allows. Every whale, dolphin and porpoise in Indian waters sits in Schedule I of the Wild Life (Protection) Act - the same tier as the tiger. The data tells a different story: in Gujarat, the record of these animals has almost stopped.

What the

records show By the analysis of wildlife biologist Seema Lokhandwala, published in The Hindu, Gujarat has 15 recorded blue whale strandings. Fourteen date from the 20th century, many from the Gulf of Khambhat and river mouths near Surat.

Only one comes from after 2000. Read naively, that looks like whales abandoning the coast. Her diagnosis is different and it rests on where the records came from. Nine of the 15 trace back to just two efforts: naturalist S.T.

Moses's compilation from Baroda in the 1940s and a single compilation of Gujarat records published in 2001. When those efforts ended, so did the record. The animals did not stop. A Bryde's whale washed ashore at Dwarka in April 2016 and another probable Bryde's near Mandvi a month later, according to a report to the International Whaling Commission.

A Bryde's whale about 10.4 metres long stranded at Veraval in August 2017. In August 2023, villagers at Mor near Surat tried to save a stranded calf. Fishers at Mandvi and Porbandar say they see whales all year, more often from October to April.

Where the

chain breaks The weak link is not the law, nor even response capacity. It is recording. India does have Marine Megafauna Stranding Management Guidelines, released in 2021, which make State forest departments the nodal agencies.

But guidelines on what to do once a stranding is reported do not create the eyes that report it. Maharashtra shows the difference. With the Mangrove Foundation, set up by the state government, coordinating responders and coastal communities, it logged 109 marine mammal strandings in 2020 and 2021 alone.

Gujarat, with its long coastline and long history of blue whale records, has nothing comparable in place. What is working deserves credit. Researchers and institutes such as CMFRI document strandings when they reach them; the Marine Mammal Research and Conservation Network of India runs an online database open to anyone; and fishing communities already hold knowledge of where and when whales appear.

The missing piece is connecting them. That is what citizen science does. A fisher's photograph, a villager's phone call, a time and a place logged online - each turns a private sighting into public data. Without that layer, Schedule I protects animals the State cannot see and an absence of records will keep being misread as an absence of whales.

For the exam, the insight is precise: conservation law guards a species; only monitoring proves it is there to be guarded.