AN INVESTIGATION into the UK’s largest mass stranding of common dolphins has identified naval activity as the likely cause.
Twenty-six dolphins became stranded and died in the Fal Estuary in Cornwall on 9 June 2008. A by Paul Jepson of the Zoological Society of London and colleagues has ruled out infectious disease, pollution, decompression sickness, or attack by killer whales or bottlenose dolphins.
Documents obtained under the UK’s Freedom of Information Act gave the team records of a naval exercise that had been taking place in the area on preceding days, and on the morning of the stranding. There was no evidence of physical injury to the dolphins caused by sonar, but Jepson suspects the exercises drove the dolphins close to shore. “We have ruled out everything else,” he says, “and what we are left with is a mass stranding and a naval exercise.”
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“We have ruled everything else out, and we are left with a mass stranding and a naval exercise”
However, the UK Ministry of Defence notes routine exercises involving sonar ceased 60 hours before and so could not have caused the stranding directly.
