A dolphin that got stranded on an East Hampton beach early Friday morning died just hours later despite a robust rescue effort involving nearly a dozen people.
The 10-foot marine mammal, later identified as a female Risso’s dolphin, was first spotted by a resident walking along Albert’s Landing Beach in Amagansett before dawn on Friday.
About two hours later the struggling animal was still at the same spot, so the resident, Patrick Hines, reported the incident to East Hampton Town police.
Officials then contacted Marine Patrol and the New York Marine Rescue Center, which sent two biologists to the area.
The dolphin appeared to be in bad shape, looked malnourished and “super underweight” according to one of the biologists.
“The best thing we could do was get it out of the water and make sure it wasn’t rolling around in the tide,” Maxine Montello, the rescue center’s executive director, told the Easton Hampton Star.
The two biologists, along with three Marine Patrol officers and four State Department of Environmental Conservation officers, placed the animal in a sling and carried it to the response truck, where they hoped they would be able to treat it, before fitting the animal with a satellite tag and sending it back to the ocean.
Unfortunately, the dolphin was already too debilitated and didn’t survive the effort.
“Our number one goal always is to return these animals back to the wild,” Montello said. “But unfortunately sometimes these animals are so compromised that [the] best thing for them is that they die naturally or to euthanize them so that they’re no longer suffering.”
The dolphin was then taken to the Atlantic Marine Conservation Society for a necropsy.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), necropsies of marine mammals provide scientists with valuable insights into the health of both the individual animal and the broader species, as well as the ocean ecosystem.
