Ocean Sentry
The two stranded Risso”s dolphins rescued in Samar on Friday that died over the weekend might have been victims of dynamite fishing, the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources said. One of the two dolphins that were brought to Tacloban City by a team from BFAR died Saturday evening and the other died Sunday afternoon while being treated at the BFAR regional office.
BFAR-8 regional director Juan Albaladejo said that the initial findings of the necropsy on the dead animals conducted Sunday evening showed that “the animals were victims of flagrant use of explosives.”
The necropsy found severely fractured bones that housed the inner ear, resulting in the dolphins’ loss of buoyancy, Albaladejo told the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
Risso’s dolphins, also known as Grampus, are said to be one of the larger members of the dolphin family.
They are relatively robust with a rounded head, similar in shape to the more familiar pilot whale.
The two Risso’s dolphins, both males, had been sighted by fishermen for about a week at the Maqueda Bay area. But around 5 a.m. last Friday, one of the dolphins got entangled on a fishing net about two kilometers from the shoreline of San Sebastian, Samar.
The two were found to have slight scratches, laceration on the belly and both have been weakened.
Albaladejo said the bigger dolphin was 2.8 meters long with a body width of 45 centimeters while the smaller one was 2.5 meters long with a body width of 40 centimeters.
He said that upon learning of the stranding incident in Samar, he immediately sent a team to recover the Risso’s dolphins and to bring both on stretchers to the BFAR regional office in Tacloban on a trip that took almost 12 hours.
The BFAR personnel gave antibiotics and multivitamins to the two dolphins.
Unfortunately, the smaller dolphin died around 10 p.m. on Saturday while the bigger one died the following day.
(From newsinfo.inquirer.net, Samar, Philippines, by Vicente Labro)
