Dead dolphin pulled from ocean

MANASQUAN — A dead 350-pound bottlenose dolphin was recovered Sunday morning from the ocean about a half-mile off Manasquan beach by members of the Point Pleasant First Aid Dive Team, said chief diver Chet Nesley.

A private boater reported the animal's location to the Coast Guard about 9 a.m. Sunday. It was taken by members of the dive team to the Marine Mammal Stranding Center in Brigantine.

The animal originally was spotted by mariners aboard the private vessel Double Vision, which reported a bottlenose dolphin floating dead on the surface of the ocean.

The stranding center investigates the deaths of recovered marine mammals and cares for those found in need of care and rehabilitation.

This is the second time in a month that the dive team went out to do a training exercise and ended up working with the stranding center, Nesley said. During Easter weekend, live seals were recovered from beaches in Seaside Heights and Brick. Dive team members were able to visit the recovering seals while they were dropping off the dolphin, Nesley said.

"The dive team was just about to enter Manasquan Inlet for a training dive when we overheard the call," Nesley said in an e-mailed statement. "We contacted the Marine Mammal Stranding Center, who advised us to take the call and recover the body."

TowBoatU.S. donated a boat and a skipper to run the dive team out for the recovery. Divers Tom Conroy and Tom Trafer entered the water and strapped the carcass onto a backboard, and Nesley, dive team member Flo Melo and TowBoat captain Rick Fay pulled the animal onto the boat.

Stranding Center staff noted scratches along the carcass "that could have been bite marks from other dolphins, but they were mostly superficial and unlikely the direct cause of death," Nesley said.

Fishing boat fire prompts Coast Guard response

The U.S. Coast Guard dispatched an HH-65C Dolphin helicopter and a 47-foot motor lifeboat to the fishing vessel Triple Star after the boat reported a major engine room fire early Saturday morning, 21 miles offshore of the Humboldt Bay entrance near Eureka.

The press release stated that the Coast Guard diverted the Dolphin helicopter from its morning patrol, dispatched a 47-foot motor lifeboat, and received replies from numerous mariners, including Humboldt State University's Coral Sea research vessel.

Fifteen minutes later, the fire aboard the Triple Star reignited but was successfully extinguished once again by the crew. The Dolphin helicopter arrived on scene with both dewatering and firefighting equipment, and remained overhead until the Coast Guard motor lifeboat arrived, said the release. After confirming that no further flooding or fires were evident, the Triple Star was towed back to Humboldt Bay.

According to a press release from the Coast Guard, at 10:23 a.m. Saturday, Coast Guard Group Humboldt Bay received an emergency call from the 54-foot Eureka trawler, requesting assistance following a hydraulic steering failure that developed into a major fire aboard the vessel's engine room.

The skipper of the vessel was initially able to douse the fire using the Triple Star's onboard fire suppression system, but could not determine whether it was fully extinguished, or if the fire posed additional danger from flooding, the press release said.

A look at outdoors events in South Florida

Excavator, skippered by Brandon Mullar of Duck Key, took the runner-up spot with 10 sails. Third-place Owl's Nest and fourth-place Lights Out each got eight, but Owl's Nest leads on time.

The top three boats fished live baits suspended from kites in a packed fleet that hugged a north-south color change off Middle Sambo Shoal. The depths of the bites varied throughout the day with the movement of the blue-green current edge.

''The whole fleet was there, rigger to rigger,'' Owl's Nest captain Matt Tambor of Miami Beach said. ``Kites were tangling up, fish jumping everywhere. It kept getting tighter and tighter and tighter. I had words with a couple of my friends.''

Get Lit ''picked here and there'' for most of the day, captain Quinton Dieterle said, releasing its final fish at 2:07 p.m. with nearly 1 ½ hours to go before lines-out.

''It was killing us at the end. We just couldn't get a bite,'' Dieterle said.

But none of the rest of the 77-boat fleet could overcome the leaders as the bite slowed. A total of 216 sails were caught and released.

• Registration is open for Competition Tackle's 13th annual Dolphin Round-up (June 1-28). ''Dolphin Dash for Cash'' one-day tournaments will be held May 17 and 24. Entry is free for the Dolphin Dash if registered by May 16. Entry fee for the Round-up is $175 for a team of four. Call 954-581-4476.

• Bass Busters will hold silver- and gold-division tournaments Saturday and Sunday on Lake Okeechobee at Clewiston. Entry fee for the silver division Saturday is $60 per team ($100 per team for gold division Sunday). Visit bassbustersflorida.com.

High Standard is in fifth place with seven sails. The sixth-through-10th-place boats -- Vitamin Sea Too, Bipolar, EZ Rider, On Belay and Rock Star -- each has six.

Fishing for a share of $1.6 million in prize money continues Thursday, followed by an off day Friday and the final round Saturday. Eighteen of the 77 teams are competing for points in the final leg of the Sailfish Pro Series, where the top six advance to a playoff in Miami Beach in May.

New Boat for Ecotours Coming in May

By: Tom Wagner


In May, The Florida Aquarium introduces a brand new, larger catamaran with three times the capacity for the popular Wild Dolphin Ecotours. This ship, specially made for the aquarium, is 72 feet long and 27 feet wide with two decks and holds 149 passengers.

The first deck is fully enclosed with air-conditioning, three flat-screen televisions for video presentations and large windows on both sides for full viewing of Florida's amazing ecosystems. The top deck is partially covered to offer protection from the sun.

The new catamaran, yet to be named, will mainly be used for daily Wild Dolphin Ecotours but can also be rented out for special events, cocktail receptions with bar and hors d'oeuvres and may even host weddings out on Tampa Bay.

Keep your eyes open for details of the grand christening of the new boat in May and plan your special event starting in June.

Lovely memories of dolphin show

WITH reference to The Herald article about the dolphins going to Hong Kong (“End of era as dolphins head for new home in Hong Kong”, March 27), the first dolphin was Haig, trained by Colin Taylor and Muriel Rowe. Then Dimple was added to the tank.

Subsequently they caught Daan. Dimple and Daan then produced Dolly and also Dolfie.

Last but not least don‘t forget about little Rockie, the penguin with his little boat.

These were lovely shows and bring back good memories. – Wendy Lear, Linton Grange, Port Elizabeth. Wonderful dolphins that will make us feel the wonder of the world and its gift given for us.

Asian Dolphin, Feared Dying, Is Thriving

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Countering their expectations, biologists working in Bangladesh have found a thriving population of 6,000 Irrawaddy dolphins, a species restricted to brackish bays and rivers from southern Asia to northern Australia that marine mammal experts had worried was vulnerable to extinction.

The population, many times larger than any other known regional groups of the dolphins, was revealed in 2004 in the first systematic survey for marine mammals along Bangladesh’s coast of waterways, bays and mangrove-fringed islands. The full results were described Wednesday in Hawaii at the first international conference on protected areas for marine mammals and in a paper in the winter issue of the Journal of Cetacean Research and Management.

American and Bangladeshi biologists conducted the dolphin survey by boat. The researchers said that the six- to eight-foot dolphins, while apparently thriving, needed to be protected and monitored in view of rising threats like entanglement in fishing nets, a decline in freshwater flows because of dam construction and inland diversions of water along the rivers that sustain the coastal ecosystems.

The scientists also signaled a long-term threat to the dolphins from global warming, which climate studies project will raise sea levels and change the river flows as Himalayan glaciers erode. This would shrink the species’ range, which is restricted to water with low salinity.

The Wildlife Conservation Society, which led the study, is working with the Bangladesh Ministry of Environment and Forests to create protected areas for the dolphin and for another species, the Ganges River dolphin, and seeking money for the effort, said Howard Rosenbaum, a biologist who directs the “ocean giants” program of the nonprofit group. “This mother-lode population in Bangladesh really gives us hope for the survivability of the species in the long term,” Dr. Rosenbaum said.

Dolphin and porpoise species that have adapted to rivers and deltas around the world have long been considered some of the most vulnerable of marine mammals because of their restricted habitats. In 2007, experts concluded that the baiji, a river dolphin that thrived in the Yangtze River for 20 million years in what is today China, had been driven extinct by a variety of activities by the nearly half billion people now living in that watershed.

The vaquita, a porpoise living in waters where the Colorado River empties into the Gulf of California, is critically endangered, biologists say, depleted by fishing nets and the disruptions in the river’s flow from dam construction.

6,000 Rare, Large River Dolphins Found in Bangladesh

A previously unknown population of Irrawaddy dolphins discovered in Bangladesh has given scientists "great hope" for the survival of the rare species, conservationists said Wednesday. Its very unique, I guess its exotic. It belong to those animals that are extinct.

A research team estimated that 6,000 Irrawaddy dolphins thrive in the country's Sundarbans mangrove forests and nearby waters of the Bay of Bengal.

The group is the largest ever found—previously, scattered groups of only about a hundred Irrawaddy dolphins each had been found throughout the dolphin's Southeast Asian habitat, which stretches from the mouths of rivers feeding the Bay of Bengal across open waters to Indonesia (map of the region).

The species' total worldwide population is unknown.

(Related: "Irrawaddy River Dolphin Closer to Extinction Despite Reports, Experts Say.")

"Thats why this is so exciting … ," said Howard Rosenbaum, head of the ocean giants research program at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the conservation group that made the discovery.

"Here you have this area where we found nearly 6,000 animals—it gives us hope for protecting the entire species and this really important habitat."

Few marine-mammal biologists had previously explored the diverse water ecosystem where the new dolphin group was found, which ranges from freshwater mangroves to brackish water to deep ocean canyons in just a small area.

Because the 6.5- to 8-foot-long (2- to 2.5-meter-long) mammals surface only occasionally, researchers used a transect method to gather data about the population.

The team steered a boat along a straight line, noting any dolphin sightings along each run.

A wider population estimate was then made from that data, presented Wednesday at the First International Conference on Marine Mammal Protected Areas in Maui, Hawaii.