Monday Marine Animal Response Society’s rescue workers look for a stranded dolphin pod in Merigomish Bay, N.S., after three dolphins were found dead in four days.
The third dolphin was found in the same spot as the first one on the shoreline of Big Island, N.S., a peninsula located in Pictou County, on Sunday.
Robert Lange, an amateur photographer who found the dolphins, suggested it might be last week’s supermoon coupled with the narrowing harbour that contributed to a pod of dolphins being stranded.
Merigomish Harbour has a wide opening between Big Island and the Mainland, but it narrows significantly and closes at the other end. The supermoon also meant there was a particularly low tide.
“We assume that these [dolphins] were probably chasing a school of fish, and got up here, and got out of the channel and into the shallow water and couldn’t get back,” Lange told CTV Atlantic.
Lange first noticed the pod of dolphins while driving home last week.
“The dolphins were swimming very close to shore here and when I stopped and looked closer with the binoculars, there was a pod of maybe a dozen or more swimming very close together,” he said. “The fins were all out of the water and the tide was very low with the supermoon.”
One of the animals died that night and another washed ashore the following morning.
Marine Animal Response Society’s co-ordinator, Andrew Reid, told CTV Atlantic that the third dead dolphin suggested the pod may still be stranded in the harbour.
“It will be really important to do a good survey of that harbour [and] confirm that there are no remaining animals in there,” said Reid. “For the animal that just washed up (Sunday), we'll do further sampling, do a necropsy, and see if this was a healthy animal or not.”
He is currently in the Merigomish Harbour area investigating to see if any of the 15 dolphins that were spotted last week are still there.
If any are found, Reid said that they might use boats to try and guide any remaining dolphins back out to sea.
Reid said that preliminary examinations of the two dolphins discovered last week found that they were both healthy apart from being somewhat thin.
With a report from CTV Atlantic’s Dan Macintosh and files from The Canadian Press
