By Patrick Manning, Massey University journalism student<\/p>\n
Stormy weather is still the most likely cause of death for a number of eagle rays found dead on Porirua shores, experts say.<\/p>\n
Twenty dead eagle rays and dead two rig sharks were spotted by Wellington Coast Clean-Up crew members along with other volunteers.<\/p>\n
It told RNZ this week that remained the most likely explanation.<\/p>\n
Specialist staff visited the site to collect samples and had them tested in an animal health laboratory.<\/p>\n
MPI said the samples collected showed no signs of disease.<\/p>\n
The stomachs were empty, but also in good body condition.<\/p>\n
One of the volunteers for Wellington Coast Clean-Up Crew Lorraine Shaab said she had never seen anything like this on Wellington’s shores since forming the group in 2017.<\/p>\n
“We’ve never encountered anything like this before. We’ve never seen dead fish or dead eagle rays like we did two weeks ago.”<\/p>\n
She said four more dead eagle rays were found in Aotea lagoon nearby.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for MPI said given that it was a tidal lagoon, it considered the mortalities to be a result of the same event.<\/p>\n
The Department of Conservation confirmed it had been alerted to the mass death, but as the affected animals were not protected species, it would not be involved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Patrick Manning, Massey University journalism student Stormy weather is still the most likely cause of death for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":501080,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[111,139,69,147,406],"class_list":["post-533562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=533562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533562\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/501080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=533562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=533562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=533562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}