The British Divers Marine Life Rescue team (BDMLR) was first alerted to a strangely behaving pod of dolphins at Cromarty Firth, Scotland. The group of 50 bottlenose dolphins had stranded in shallow water at low tide. However, the place was too dangerous to approach by boat, leaving the helpers to watch and hope for high tide.
Indeed, the animals were able to refloat with the incoming water, though they did not swim off to a deeper and safer area. On the contrary, by the time the BDMLR team started monitoring them again in the morning, the pod had moved even further into the Cromarty Firth getting dangerously close to the shallow waters beyond Cromarty Bridge. It was only around lunchtime that they were finally turned around and left the inlet for the deep sea.
Sadly, the stranding event did not end as fortunate as it seemed. Five dead stranded bottlenose dolphins were found in the area the following days, most likely members of the pod. The Scottish Marine Mammal Strandings Scheme performed post-mortem examinations on-site but further investigations are still undergoing.
So far, it has been concluded that the pod was not one of the local ones based on unmatching photo IDs but appear to be an unknown offshore group instead. BDMLR also described the dolphins’ behaviour as ‘strange’ and categorized the stranding event as “highly unusual […], the likes we have not encountered before.“ It remains to be seen what further investigations uncover.
The full coverage of the story can be found here: (8) British Divers Marine Life Rescue - Posts | Facebook