Chapter Graphic
: Trend Task: Reading Record – Non-Fiction
Loading Images
  BAND 2

Stranded, by Dawn McMillan, (photo.) Ingrid Visser, Reed Children’s Books, NZ: 1999.

Introduction:
This passage of reading is called Stranded.
It is about the many species of whales found in New Zealand.
Text:
There are over 30 species of whale in New Zealand waters and all of them have been known to strand. Some whales group together in families where they look after each other.
Many species of whales journey around the coastline of New Zealand, beginning at the top of the east coast in spring and passing through the Cook Strait in summer.
Other whales, like minke whales, spend the winter months in New Zealand waters before swimming to Antarctica to feed in the summer.
In both travelling and feeding the whales can find themselves close to shore. The whales are then in danger from the gently sloping beaches of the shoreline.
Whales that have teeth use an echo system to see what is ahead. They bounce sound waves off the sea floor or rocks and the echoes are received back into the bones of their lower jaws, like the sound waves coming into the bones of our ears.
With sloping sandy beaches the echo is scattered instead of bouncing back to the whale, and in surf the mixture of air and water fails to return the echo. With no echo system for finding its way under water a whale is in trouble.
 
Loading Images