The mystery surrounding the 30 dead sharks who washed up on a UK beach may never be solved.
The bizarre phenomenon totally shocked the nation earlier this week (6 June) when a series of images of approximately 30 starry smooth-hound sharks were snapped on a Prestatyn beach in Denbighshire, North Wales.
It has since baffled both the locals and the rest of the UK with Rob Deaville, project manager of the Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme, alluding to a 'whole range' of possibilities which could explain the peculiar event.
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Deaville explained: "There’s been a lot of speculation about bycatch and discards which is certainly a possibility.
"But there’s other factors as well. They might have been caught out by the tide and left high and dry as a group.
"There might be some social factor to this, some mating behaviour we’re not across yet."
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The shark expert went on to highlight that there may be 'other factors' that researchers 'can't diagnose without a post-mortem'.
"Although," he continued, "that’s perhaps less likely given the number of animals found together in a short space of time."
Deaville's colleague attempted to recover some of the shark remains, but they were unfortunately too late as nearby predators had already scavenged the carcasses.
Because of that, he's not yet been able to pinpoint exactly what happened to the sharks and why they all ended up on the British shore in the first place.
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And he wasn't the only one baffled by the whole ordeal.
Gem Simmons, from British Divers Marine Life Rescue, also rushed to Prestatyn beach upon seeing the striking images online but ran into the exact same issue and was therefore unable to take samples.
"The first thing I wanted to check was whether they had any gill damage. There have been a few reports in the area of illegal gillnets but we haven’t got much evidence of that," she told the Daily Star.
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She continued: "We have found from talking to people on social media that there seems to have been a number of these [shark mass strandings]. This was certainly the biggest one."
According to Simmons, it seems we may never get to the bottom of the exact cause which led to this week's mass shark stranding.
She was, however, adamant to not blame local fishing communities for the incident.
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"I wouldn’t want to make an assumption. It could have had a completely natural cause. It could have been a current that brought them in together," Simmons told the news outlet.
"My personal opinion is that this is worrying, particularly as so many other people have come forward and said they’ve seen potentially sinister stuff in the past few months."
The expert has since urged the public to get in touch with Marine Environmental Monitoring if they happen to come across a group of dead sharks.
She also warned beachgoers, especially those with dogs, to not get too 'near' to them if such a situation presents itself.
Simmons explained: "It’s just about not removing them, not touching them in any way and also making sure your dogs don’t go near them.
"Because if it was something biological, an indicator of pollution or something like that, the last thing you want is something to be passed onto your dogs."
Rhiannon Ingle