This is a 600-foot floating slaughterhouse capable of processing an entire whale in less than half an hour.

In June of 1975, several green-piece activists set sail under a banner which would become a famous slogan.

We were left with no alternative but to carry out our pledge to use our bodies and shields.

Save the whales.

We have stopped one chaser boat already and saved one pot of whales, which is not bad for our first morning's work.

Greenpeace's constant campaigning against commercial whaling worked.

The International Whaling Commission issued a moratorium on whale hunting in 1985.

Humpback whales, a population once decimated by more than 95%, started making a comeback.

But somethings recently happened.

Concerned at the Jersey Shore after yet another whale washed up on an Atlantic City beach.

Dead whales have started washing up on shores again, many over the last winter.

More whales are dying along the east coast this weekend.

Now marine conservation groups are trying to figure out why it's happening.

And it begs the question, do we need to save the whales again?

For Scientific Americans, science quickly, I'm Tileka Bose.

But what's happening right now is what's called an unusual mortality event.

That is the official name for an unusual number of dead animals washing up of a particular species.

That's Joy Wiedenberg. She's a comparative anatomist and a scientist that also does whale necropsees.

Or in layman's terms, whale autopsies.

So when an animal washes a shore dead, the first thing we do is we examine the outside of the body.

Why did the animal die? And what can we learn from its body?

Though scientists can't confirm what's causing this unusual mortality event,

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