The carcass of a fifth dolphin, apparently from last summer's wayward group stranded in a New Jersey river, washed ashore last night at a park in the town of Rumson, News 4 New York has learned.
This comes just days after the remains of the fourth dead Bottlenose dolphin were found floating in the Shrewsbury-Navesink river complex last week.
"I was waiting for it to happen," Rumson Police Chief Richard Tobias told reporter Brian Thompson, explaining that he was not surprised.
This fifth dead dolphin, by the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's count, was spotted last night in the surf at Victory Park in Rumson. That's near the Oceanic Bridge connecting Rumson to Middletown, and where many of the dolphins had been swimming late last Fall in the Navesink River.
This dolphin was badly decomposed, meaning it had probably died months ago, according to Scott Longfield, a volunteer who occasionally helps the Marine Mammal Stranding Center located in Brigantine, N.J.
A quick necropsy determined there were no food remains in its stomach, suggesting the dolphin may have starved to death. Only a fishhook was found there.
"They are being found dead now," said Chief Tobias, expressing a concern among advocates that of the sixteen or so that first became a popular tourist attraction last summer, few may have made it out to Sandy Hook Bay, and then out to the ocean for their annual migration.
NOAA's Marine Fisheries Service at one point considered herding them out to sea with a volunteer boat flotilla, but its scientists decided the risks of trauma and subsequent death were too great.
Rumson police would have been part of such a flotilla, and Chief Tobiasnow says "I would like to have been given a chance."
"They waited too long, the water froze, the fish left," said advocate Longfield, explaining why he thinks the dolphins starved to death.
Advocates say the count should be six, not five.
They believe a sixth dead Bottlenose found floating last winter past the mouth of the Shrewsbury River in Sandy Hook Bay may have been part of the same group, carried there by the currents of the tidal river. NOAA has never confirmed that.
