Abstract
Dr. LEONARD GILL, in the Report of the South African Museum for the year 1935 (1936, p. 10), recounts another of those mass strandings of Pseudorca crassidens which have become so frequent since the reappearance of the species in the Dornoch Firth. The school came ashore at Mamre, about fifty miles north of Cape Town, and the occurrence was peculiar because of the large number of whales stranded, about three hundred, and because they came ashore not on sand but on jagged rocks. But a common feature of the strandings has been, as here, that the whales appear to have been trapped by a falling tide in channels cut off from the open sea by sand-banks. The Mamre stranding took place towards the close of 1935, and seven years before, about the same time of the year, the first record of the species in African waters was made when about a hundred came ashore at Kommetjie, some sixteen miles south of Cape Town.
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False Killer Whales in South Africa. Nature 138, 541–542 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/138541d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/138541d0