Scientists believe whales are from same pod as one that died on a Norfolk beach and are worried about surviving members

Three dead sperm whales have washed up on a beach near Skegness. Crowds flocked to see the creatures, believed to be from the same pod as one that died on Hunstanton beach in Norfolk, despite efforts to help it back into deeper water after it became stranded.

Scientists are now concerned about any surviving members of the pod, thought to have comprised at least six whales.

The Skegness whales were spotted in the early hours of Sunday morning. The coastguard cordoned off the giant bodies, but word spread and Adam Holmes from the Skegness lifeboat station said the Lincolnshire town was “as busy as a bank holiday”.

Scientists from the Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme (CSIP), who took samples of skin, blubber, teeth and blood from the Hunstanton whale, will carry out postmortems on the Skegness bodies.



CSIP records and investigates all UK strandings of dolphins, porpoise and whales, but Rob Deauville, the programme organiser, said the sperm whales were unusual. He told the BBC: “Every year we get 600 strandings of cetaceans in the UK and a handful, about five or six a year, are sperm whales.”

A rescue effort was mounted to try to save the Hunstanton whale, with volunteer divers joining lifeboat crews, coastguards and staff from the Hunstanton Sea Life centre. Their efforts failed to push the whale, which had injured its tail from thrashing in the shallows, back into deeper water.

A Hunstanton lifeboat spokesman, Geoff Needham, said it was a sad end for such a magnificent creature. “This large animal was unable to make for deeper water. As the tide was dropping away, nothing more could be done.”

The whales may have been part of a much larger group, six of which died in Germany and six in the Netherlands when they beached.

Sperm whales are deep sea creatures and can easily become disoriented if they get into shallow water.

Peter Evans, the director of the Sea Watch Foundation, a charity that coordinates sightings around the UK coast, said they were likely to be adolescents, a few years old.



“Squid probably came in and the whales fed on them but ran out of food. The further south they got, the shallower the water, and when they got to Norfolk, which is very, very shallow, they probably lost their way.”

Statistics kept by the CSIP for the past 25 years show a gradual increase in beachings, in line with reports from other countries, including the US. One of the largest recent events was the death of 33 pilot whales on an island off the coast of Donegal in 2010. Climate change and disturbance caused by the increased use of underwater sonar are among the factors being studied internationally.

In January 2006 huge crowds lined the banks of the Thames in London to watch the progress of a northern bottlenose whale, the first seen in the river since records began more than a century ago. The whale swam as far as Battersea and despite being successfully lifted out of the water in a canvas sling and on to a barge to take her back to the Kent coast, she died.

Her skeleton, briefly on display at the Guardian exhibition space, is now part of the Natural History Museum’s collection.