Summer of ‘unprecedented’ dolphin strandings ends with biggest one yet, MA rescuers say
A surge in dolphin strandings hit a crescendo when rescuers rushed to free 14 dolphins trapped off Cape Cod.
On Sept. 16, the team arrived to find 11 of the 14 still alive and got to work trying get the pod back to deeper waters.
“This marked the largest bottlenose dolphin mass stranding in the Northeast region,” the International Fund for Animal Welfare said in a Sept. 17 news release.
Rescuers began preparing the surviving animals to swim back out once the tide rose, giving the dolphin group identification tags and a satellite to track them in case of another stranding.
Strandings along Massachusetts have been in a sharp rise.
“In just the last two weeks, we have responded to 26 dolphin strandings, both common and bottlenose, so we have been on high alert and monitoring their movements closely,” Kira Kasper, biologist and animal responder at IFAW, said in the news release.
And this is not isolated to the past few weeks. Strandings have more than doubled in recent months along the shore of Cape Cod, according to the group.
“This mass stranding comes toward the end of an unprecedented summer for our team due to the sheer number of dolphin strandings. Since the end of June, the team has responded to 175 live stranded dolphins, which is over 2.5 times our annual average,” Kasper said.
Experts said Cape Cod’s atypical topography is to blame for animal strandings along its shoreline. Its shallow waters, tidal movements and many sandbars cause marine animals to get confused and stuck.
With this in mind, rescuers on the Sept. 16 mission kept track of the 11 rescued dolphins after releasing them out to the ocean.
Low and behold, the entire group of 11 was stranded again the following morning.
Rescuers again rushed to their aid.
“Our team moved quickly to extract the animals from treacherous mud, provide necessary health assessments and treatments, and transport the dolphins to Herring Cove in Provincetown, where they were all released back to the ocean,” Kasper said.
This story was originally published September 19, 2024 at 3:00 PM with the headline "Summer of ‘unprecedented’ dolphin strandings ends with biggest one yet, MA rescuers say."