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PRACHUAP KHIRI KHAN, 6 August 2014 (NNT) - A large whale carcass has been found on the famous Hua-Hin Beach of Prachuap Khiri Khan province.
Local fisherman have discovered the carcass of a Bryde’s Whale measuring four meters long and weighing more than 300 kilograms on the beach as they were setting sail to catch some squid. The group immediately notified the Hua Hin Municipality about the incident.
Authorities from the Marine and Coastal Resources Research Center in the Lower Gulf of Thailand are now working to determine the exact cause of death.
Necropsy tests would be conducted to see whether the whale has sustained any injuries, especially in the abdominal cavity.
Many shrimp ponds in Chanthaburi and throughout Thailand remain bone dry at this late point in the season because of fears about a scourge affecting crustaceans regionwide. EMS (Early Mortality Syndrome) is a phenomenon as mysterious as it is deadly and in the past three years, it has threatened to undermine Asia’s commercial shrimping industry.
Reports of EMS first surfaced in 2009 in China, where farmers noticed that their prawns had begun dying en-masse, without any identifiable cause.
In the commercial shrimping industry, where occasional epidemics are par for the course, a Chinese die-off failed to qualify as news. However, as the months proceeded and dead shrimp continued to pile up, the statistics became too massive to ignore.
By 2011, shrimp farms in China’s Hainan, Guangdong, Fujian and Guangxi provinces were suffering losses as great as 80%. Without a specific pathogen to blame, farmers christened the disease according to its immediate effect – Early Mortality Syndrome.
From China, EMS made the leap to Vietnam and to Malaysia, where it left similarly massive swathes of devastation. In 2011 and 2012, EMS wreaked havoc on Vietnam’s shrimping industry. The province of Tra Vinh saw 330 million shrimp die in the month of June 2011 alone. Aquaculture news outlet The Fish Site used terms like “widespread devastation” in describing the outbreak.