The director of UNCW's Marine Mammal Stranding program, Dr. Michael Tift, said that for this summer, “The number of overall strandings is not terribly high, so knock on wood, and that can change in an instant. We've had diseases come through where we're responding to strandings almost every day.”
Bottlenose dolphins make up most of the strandings on the North Carolina coast, about 71% as of last year, and Tift said happily those numbers have been lower this year.
Other dolphins also strand off the coast, such as the short-beaked common dolphin, Risso’s dolphin, and rough-toothed dolphin. They account for about 8% of 2022’s overall strandings. Two harbour porpoises washed up last year, too.
*Note: You can see a table of all the NC marine mammal strandings at the end of this article.
Don’t water or feed the manatees
Encouraging dolphin-stranding statistics notwithstanding, Dr. Tift is still worried about manatees that are coming up from Florida to spend the summers in the intercoastal waterways.
“The problem is that because we're experiencing warmer and warmer waters all the time, those manatees are staying around longer and longer. And why that's a problem is that when it finally gets cold in North Carolina, it can get cold really fast. And when those animals are exposed to those really fast, cold changes in temperature, they can have big issues, so they get cold-stunned, and they just basically tend to deteriorate at that point,” Tift said.
He said the worst thing for people to do is to give manatees water or feed them. That gives the animal a reason to stay, which increases their risks — and that’s something he and his team don’t want.
“Manatees are attracted to fresh water and even the sound of a hose running, so much so they will come up and drink out of it. People do this often, unfortunately. The manatees do love it, but it’s not good for several reasons,” said Tift. “Those are that it’s illegal, and a person could face serious fines because of the Marine Mammal Protection Act. It can further attract them to stay in areas of high boat traffic (e.g., marinas), which can lead to them being struck by boats and being injured or killed.”
Tift adds the state doesn’t have boating speed restrictions for manatees as they do in Florida, which makes North Carolina waters more dangerous for them to spend more time in.
“We're starting to crunch the numbers now to see if there is a trend of increasing manatees. It might be that we're just getting more calls than we did in the past. And so we really are trying to figure out a way to monitor this because it seems to be happening at a rapid rate in terms of call volume,” Tift said.
Stranded whales
According to last year’s data on stranded whales, North Carolina had four humpbacks, four pygmy sperm, two short-finned pilots, two dwarf sperm whales, and one beaked whale that washed up on shore. They account for 16% of the overall strandings in the state.
In early August this year, a young male pilot whale, which was eight feet long and just over 600 pounds, stranded off the Outer Banks, just north of Rodanthe. Tift said by the time he had arrived the animal had died, so he then worked with stranding teams from the Outer Banks, NC State University’s Center for Marine Science and Technology (CMAST), and NCDEQ to perform the necropsy in a lab at Morehead City. The cause of death of the pilot whale is still inconclusive.
Tift said it’s fairly common for these pilot whales to strand because they are herd animals.
“In fact, you may have heard in [Australia], these animals strand in large numbers often, which is what we were really worried was going to happen, but knock on wood, that this was the only animal that stranded that day,” Tift said.
However, Tift added that when these unfortunate events happen, scientists “try to learn about them, to see why they died. Is there anything we can do to prevent that death?”
And these agencies are required to report their findings back to the national government, through the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration or NOAA, which is the organization that manages marine mammals
Tift said another unfortunate event happened earlier in the summer. On June 2, a mother and calf pygmy sperm whale, a species that commonly strands off the NC coast, washed up on Figure Eight Island. The cause of death for these two whales, like the pilot, is still inconclusive. Those who work with the stranding network are testing for diseases and looking closely at the histology of their tissues.
And he and his team hope they don’t have to respond to a future North Atlantic right whale stranding, as there are only 300 left in the world. They live all the way up from the northeast coast of Canada, and they travel all the way down to North Carolina, and even Florida.
And there’s some happier news, according to Tift, a right whale named Calvin has come to give birth off one of the Wrightsville Beach piers a couple of times.
As far as he’s heard, the name Calvin comes from the comic book, Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin was named as a calf, but then they found out she was a female, and just kept the name.
What can harm or kill whales, other marine mammals
Tift said a common cause of death in North Atlantic right whales is going to be ship strikes. For other whales, it can be drilling or other sonar events.
For dolphins and seals, it can be things like entanglement in ropes from fishing gear.
These 'fishery interaction events,' according to Tift, are common experiences for these marine mammals.
“But those are the kinds of things that we try to pass back to our colleagues and try to make decisions about whether there is anything we can learn from the type of fishing line that they were entangled in, or the type of fishing gear they got into trouble with, so that we can work with fishermen, work with organizations to limit the number of times this happens,” Tift said.
“And so it's important to think about the impacts that humans have on these animals,” he said.
Ways to help
If you see a sick, injured, or dead marine mammal call 911, and local police will dispatch the stranding team — or you can reach them directly at 910-515-7354.
The work Tift and the stranding team do at Oriole Burevitch Laboratory on UNCW’s campus receives no funding from the state.
"We rely 100% on grants and donations,” Tift said. He added that he hopes that will change in the future.
Tift said that thousands of UNCW students have been involved with the program over the course of 30 years of the network’s existence. Those who eventually go on to “lead other stranding programs or to have successful careers as marine mammal biologists.”
As a result of this work, these UNCW undergraduate and graduate students have helped professors publish “hundreds of scientific papers that have resulted from the lab’s ability to respond to marine mammals and collect samples to learn more about their health and apply that towards their conservation,” Tift said.
2022 NC Stranding Data by Ben Schachtman on Scribd
Resources
- Dr. Tift’s UNCW Comparative Physiology Laboratory (the link to his publications is here)
- UNCW’s Marine Mammal Stranding Program
- ‘Something profoundly wrong’: Marine biologists puzzled by large beaching of pilot whales, August 1, 2023
- A detailed look inside UNCW’s Marine Mammal Stranding Program, May 2022
- Odd marine mammals, possibly driven by climate change, are at risk on NC’s coast, May 2022
- The Calvin Project, North Atlantic Right Whale
- NC State University - Center for Marine Science and Technology (CMAST)
- Support UNCW’s Biology Mammal Strand Fund
