Using a sling, Linda D'eri, left, and Misty Niemeyer, members of an International Fund for Animal Welfare rescue team, carry one of 11 dolphins stranded ion a mud flat during low tide in Wellfleet, Mass., on 14 February 2012. Ten of the dolphins were saved and one died. There have been 177 dolphins stranded in the area since 12 January 2012. Stephan Savoia / Associated Press

By Tim Wall
9 April 2012 Several mass deaths of dolphins have occurred over the past few years and while experts are worried about the die-off they say we are not witnessing a global population crash. But what is behind the recent mass strandings and deaths is complicated and, inevitably, involves humans. For example, the bottlenose dolphin die-off in Gulf of Mexico started in early 2010, even before BP’s massive oil spill in April 2010. Disease was linked to some of the hundreds of Gulf dolphin deaths, but not all of them. The ultimate cause remains mysterious. “There is no evidence at this time to indicate that such a worldwide, multi-species crash is occurring,” Randall Wells, director of the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program said. “The large-scale mortality events and mass strandings that have made the news in the past two years appear to be unrelated.” Nonetheless, the past two years have been rough for several species of dolphins, but not all of the nearly 40 species of dolphins are in hot water. “There is not a large-scale die-off of dolphins across the globe or throughout ocean basins,” said Connie Barclay, spokesperson for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s National Marine Fisheries Service. “What we do see are localized areas where strandings and deaths have increased,” Barcaly said. “Scientists have seen unusually high rates of illness and death in specific populations of bottlenose dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico, long-beaked common dolphins along the beaches of Peru and short-beaked common dolphins along the shores of Cape Cod.” And only certain populations of the affected species have been hit hard. “While bottlenose dolphins in the northern Gulf of Mexico are dying at higher-than-average rates, elsewhere in the Gulf of Mexico bottlenose dolphin populations are doing fine,” Wells, a former chair of NOAA’s Working Group on Marine Mammal Unusual Mortality Events, said. One population that suffered a serious dolphin disaster swam in the Pacific off the coast of Peru. Discovery News recently reported on the thousands of dolphin corpses washing up on the tropical beaches. “The Peru mass stranding is the largest ever reported in the (Western Hemisphere) and the biggest since the mass stranding in Europe during the ’90s,” Carlos Yaipen-Llanos, president and science director for Organization for Research and Conservation of Aquatic Animals (ORCA). […]

Are dolphins doomed? They’re certainly taking a hit