A rescue team in Maharashtra's Ratnagiri on Sunday successfully pulled a blue whale stranded in shallow waters back into deep sea. The 47-foot-long calf that weighed around 20 tonnes had been stranded near the district's Madban village for two days before locals spotted it. A team of four forest officials, local NGOs and fishermen worked for around eight hours to drag the animal into deeper waters.

This is the third blue whale to have been beached along the west coast of India in a little over a year and the second successful push back to the sea. Blue whales are an endangered species that live in deep oceans and are rarely seen near the shore.

In May 2015, a group of dolphin researchers recorded a confirmed sighting of an adult and calf blue whale in the coast off Ratnagiri. This was the first such sighting of the elusive mammals in a century.

A month later, a blue whale was beached in Alibaug, south of Mumbai. This whale could not be rescued. In February, days after a Bryde's whale washed up dead on Mumbai's Juhu Beach, another blue whale was stranded on a beach in Ratnagiri. Forest officials had succeeded in sending this one back to the sea.

Mihir Sule, member of the Konkan Cetacean Research Team that spotted the first pair of blue whales last May, pointed out that all the whales that had been beached in the last two years were small, suggesting the likelihood of them being calves. "Adult blue whales are around 23 to 25 m (around 80 ft) long," Sule said. "These are half that size. They are young animals. They are emaciated and cannot swim."

It takes months for animals of that size to lose enough weight for their ribs to become visible, he added, which indicated that they had not been feeding for a long while and were likely to have already been near death.