Eight pilot whales have died after a mass stranding on the coast of Indonesia's main island of Java that sparked a major rescue operation, an official said Thursday.
Thirty-two of the short-finned pilot whales came ashore during high tide early Wednesday in Probolinggo, East Java province.
"At first there were just one or two whales swimming near the shore, and the nature of whales is that if they are sick they will come near the shore," Dedy Isfandi, the head of the local maritime and fisheries office, told AFP.
"But whales have such high social interaction - when one fell ill, they approach the sick one to swim back to sea... when the tide fell all of them were trapped," Isfandi added.