Long-finned pilot whale stranding and tagging data records from Tasmania between 1900 and 2025

Published: 2026-08-25

Data files contain long-finned pilot whale mass stranding records from Tasmania between 1900 and 2025. Records obtained from Marine Conservation Program within the Tasmanian Government. CSV file includes the date and location (site name, latitude, longitude and region) of each stranding event and the number of individuals stranded. To be considered ‘mass’ stranding events these events involved 2 (excluding cow-calf pairs) or more individuals. These data were used to assess the seasonal and regional trends in long-finned pilot whale mass strandings in Tasmania. The fields in the stranding Excel spreadsheet are: Event - Event number Date - Date (day, month, year) Year - Year Month - Month Season - Season of the year - e.g. spring, summer, etc. Lat - latitude Long - longitude Ind - Number of individuals Location - Names location where the event occurred Region - general geographic region where the event occurred Data will also eventually include the satellite tracks of two long-finned pilot whales tagged with Argos linked platform transmitter terminals (PTTs Cricket 202, Sirtrack Ltd, Havelock North, New Zealand). These whales were tagged prior to release during the 2022 Ocean Beach mass stranding event in Tasmania involving over 240 individuals. To account for the spatial error associated with Argos locations, a continuous time state space model to satellite tag transmitted Argos locations in R (version 4.4.1; R Core Team, 2024) using the fit_ssm function (using the time-varying move persistence model) from the R package aniMotum (Jonsen et al. 2023), estimating new locations at a time step of 3 hours with a corresponding index of behaviour or move persistence. These data were used data assessed to determine post release survivorship of the two whales.