‘They’re stuck’: Cape Cod seeing more whale, turtle and dolphin strandings

While Cape Cod, Massachusetts, is known as a popular vacation destination in the north-east US, it has built a reputation for an entirely different reason this year: animal strandings.

Dolphins, whales, sea lions and turtles are turning up in large numbers on the beaches of the famous peninsula in a phenomenon that has experts scrambling to execute more rescue operations than ever before. The cause? Changing tides.

A sea animal is considered “beached” or stranded when it is found alive but injured or stuck on the shore. Without expert assistance, many animals are unable to get back into the water and could die.

Brian Sharp, a senior biologist at the International Fund for Animal Welfare, one of the largest animal conservation organizations in the world, said that the best way humans can understand what it is like for an animal to be stranded “is probably similar to the stress and shock we experience in a car accident”.

For example, the rescue operation for a dolphin, which can weigh anywhere between 150 and 450lbs, is complicated. Sharp notes that his organization tries to “keep it as short as possible, because you know that animal is going under a lot of stress”.

A stranded animal is also exposed to potential scavengers, such as coyotes, making rescues a “race against time”, Sharp said.

The tools needed to save a stranded dolphin include a blanket for warmth, a sheet to cover its eyes from the sun, a special padded board to transport the animal so it can eventually be released into the water, and a team of trained staff and volunteers, said Sharp. Each stranded dolphin is then assessed to see if it’s healthy enough to be released back into the water.

If a dolphin is showing signs of poor health, emaciation or inattentiveness, Sharp said, “from a welfare perspective, we will euthanize the animal because we don’t want that animal to continue to suffer”.

Sharp said that the rescue success rate of stranded live dolphins is “somewhere between a 70 and 80% chance”. And that number has proved precise in recent months.

More than 140 dolphins were stranded off Cape Cod back in June in the largest mass stranding of the mammals in US history. While seven of the dolphins were euthanized and 37 died naturally, more than 100 survived, according to the International Fund for Animal Welfare. That amounted to roughly 70% of the dolphins involved.

Experts say the influx of animals being stranded is due to the increasingly drastic change in tidal levels. On Cape Cod, the difference between low and high tide can be between 9 and 12ft (3-4 meters), which can be fatal to a dolphin if it becomes stuck on land, Sharp said.

“While they can thrash around if they’re in shallow water, over a sandbar, and kind of squirm their way to deeper water, they need over a foot of water,” Sharp said. “Once that tide continues to drop, though, they’re stuck where they are.”

And dolphins are hardly the only ones endangered by the shifting tides.

Linda Lory, the New England Aquarium’s rescue and rehabilitation manager, has been leading the effort to save “cold-stunned” turtles. Turtles become “cold-stunned” when they’re exposed to rapidly cooling waters, which often causes them to become weak and prone to health issues.

Many of the turtles facing this problem in Cape Cod are the critically endangered Kemp’s ridley species, which are notably the smallest sea turtles in the world.

While Lory says it’s not unusual to see stranded hypothermic turtles wash up on beaches, “historically speaking, we are seeing higher numbers than usual”.

The cape’s Gulf of Maine is the fastest-warming body of water on the planet right now, “warming faster than 99% of the world’s oceans”, according to the University of New England, which means animals such as turtles are traveling farther north and ending up in places like Cape Cod. But once temperatures drop, the water becomes too cold for the shelled animals, leaving them vulnerable to becoming stranded and dying. The obvious solution is for the turtles to leave, but the reptiles run into another problem when they try: Cape Cod’s geography.

Lory called Cape Cod “a sandy hook that sticks out in the ocean”.

This hook shape can trap and disorient an animal, leaving them to continue running into a land mass in many of directions they choose.

Lory notes that by the time the cold water has come in, “then there’s really no place for them to go, because even if they can figure out to turn around and navigate out that way, they’re facing colder water out in the Atlantic”.

Saving these animals is most difficult when the animals are between release-readiness and end of life. Rescuers including Lory and Sharp arrange for stranded animals that fall into this category to go to dolphin or turtle rehabilitation and intensive care, a task that has become harder as the number of strandings has increased.

“Where we are in-taking, these turtles are very sick, very cold. They’re not moving, almost comatose, and a lot of them have pneumonia or traumatic injuries or other things going on, and so we admit them to our sea turtle hospital,” Lory said, adding that she typically sees about 170 turtles admitted around the end of the year with a survival rate of 82 to 85%. That number has more recently exceeded 500.

“We can only keep so many in our hospital, so it is really like a mass casualty [situation], all hands on deck,” she said.