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Dolphin strandings are a tragic and all too common occurrence. However, it turns out that it’s not well known how often stranded dolphins are actually found by the public – something scientists sought to fix in a recent study.
“How many people are reporting the animals is really important, because stranding networks rely on the public as their primary source of information for stranded animals,” said Jennifer Bloodgood, corresponding author of the study and assistant professor of practice at Cornell University Bloodgood to Discover Wildlife.
The experiment was carried out by researchers at Cornell University, and the results were published in the journal Marine Mammal Science. In it, they planted decoy dolphin carcasses around Dauphin Island, Alabama to see who found them.
The decoys were dolphin-shaped textile bags, filled with sand and anchored to the ground with ropes. Each decoy was tagged with a phone number, which members of the public could call if they found it. These were then left out for two weeks, one during peak tourist season and one during the offseason, in a variety of locations with different habitat types and levels of human use.
“The public only found 58% of the decoy dolphins overall, so that tells us a lot about the potential real number of actual stranded dolphins,” said Bloodgood. Those results varied by location, though. Numbers in the off-season and in lower-trafficked areas were lower than that.
The findings mean that researchers can now focus search efforts for maximum effectiveness.
“And, it’s important because we need to have better estimates of the total number of animals that are dying to really understand the effects of a specific cause of death,” added Bloodgood. “If we don’t know how many animals are stranded in the first place, it makes it difficult to try and estimate and extrapolate deaths to larger population numbers.”
