Dead dolphin found washed ashore in Avalon
The Brigantine-based Marine Mammal Stranding Center will perform a necropsy to determine how the eight-foot Bottlenose dolphin died.
A New Jersey marine mammal organization is looking into what caused the death of a dolphin that washed up on the beach in Avalon on Monday night.
Staff from the Brigantine-based Marine Mammal Stranding Center will perform a necropsy on the animal, an eight-foot Bottlenose dolphin, with assistance from the Merr Institute in Delaware. The organization will collect tissue samples from the dolphin and submit them for pathology testing, the center said in a statement.
It is not yet known what killed the animal, or how long it was on the beach before being removed. Necropsy results are expected to “take some time,” the MMSC said.
MMSC staff collected the dead dolphin from the beach on Tuesday morning and transported it back to their headquarters in Brigantine. An Avalon resident found the animal at the 50th Street area of the beach while walking their dog, according to a Facebook post by the resident, who did not immediately respond to request for comment.
The discovery of the dead dolphin comes amid heightened concern over the deaths of a number of whales found along beaches in New Jersey and New York in the last several months. Some environmental groups and politicians have called for a federal investigation into whether sonar mapping connected to offshore wind turbine projects played a role. However, no conclusions have been made, and testing to determine the mammals’ causes of death can take weeks to months.
Gov. Phil Murphy and other environmental groups have pushed back against those concerns, saying in January that the whale deaths were happening at an increased rate “long before there was any offshore wind activity.” Murphy was citing research from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has said that “no whale mortality has been attributed to offshore wind activities.”
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Last month a young humpback whale washed up on an Atlantic City beach with evidence of a large head injury behind its blowhole. An MMSC official told The Inquirer that it may have been hit by a large boat.