Strandings go up as marine ecosystems deteriorate

The deterioration of the world’s marine ecosystems contributes to an increase in marine mammal strandings each year, according to T. David Schofield, regional marine mammal health and response program manager of the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration National Marine Fisheries Service.

“The national statistics show that strandings are increasing each year a little bit. That again speaks to the decline in the health of our oceans because of pollution, fisheries imbalance, probably at some level climate change. It’s all related, it’s all connected,” he said Friday.

Schofield and Dr. Kristi West of the Hawaii Pacific University arrived Wednesday night to do a necropsy on KW2011-016, a Cuvier’s beaked whale that stranded itself on Micro Beach on Tuesday and was eventually put down.

Both Schofield and West presented last Friday at the American Memorial Park Visitors Center their preliminary findings from the 13-hour necropsy conducted at the U.S. Islands Seafood facility in Garapan.

According to Schofield, marine mammals strand themselves for a reason “and the reasons are usually multi-faceted”—including disease processes, old age, and anthropogenic or human-related causes.

“What is changing in the health of our oceans and what humans are doing to the oceans is manifested in these marine mammals. When an animal strands, it’s kind of a snapshot in time into what is affecting that population or that local ecosystem area,” he said.

Schofield emphasized that pushing these stranded or beached mammals back to the ocean is an “inhumane thing to do” as stranding is “often a survival instinct” for these animals.

“It may be a primal instinct for them that when they’re debilitated, they run to safety,” he said. “Safety, in this case, may be toward shore.”

West, in a separate interview, said that among Pacific islands, Maui in Hawaii has the most number of strandings that she has dealt with on a per capita basis.

Schofield noted that not all of these stranded marine mammals are rehabilitated, with only 1 to 2 percent surviving “to the point of being released to the wild.”

Pacific-wide network

Schofield said they are trying to develop a Pacific-wide marine mammal stranding network to study and compare notes on stranding trends, diseases, and trauma, among others.

“We’re trying to understand what is affecting marine mammals at an ocean basin level because it’s really about ocean health,” he said at the presentation.

West, for her part, said they will work and develop a relationship with the CNMI Division of Fish & Wildlife “because they are the ones who are going to be on the ground as strandings happen in the future.”

She commended the division staff for doing “an amazing job” in handling KW2011-016.

West called on the community to report any strandings to DFW. “If we don’t know about it, then we have no way to record how frequent these strandings are happening,” she added.