MANGALURU: The carcass of a humpback dolphin washed ashore at Tannirbhavi beach on Friday. It is learnt that labourers engaged in Blue Flag Beach work and beach staff noticed the dolphin near Fathima beach. Following this, the carcass was pulled ashore using a rope.
K Padmanabha Pannikar, coordinator of Yojaka (India) Ltd, said the forest department, local police station and the coastal security police were informed. Members of Reef Watch Marine Conservation rushed to the spot and conducted a postmortem, following which the dolphin was buried slightly away from the beach, he said.
Reef Watch Marine Conservation Karnataka project coordinator Thejaswini Shettigar told TOI that the post-mortem was conducted under the guidance of veterinarian Dr Suranjana Ganguli. “It is difficult to ascertain the exact cause of the dolphin’s death. The carcass was in a decomposing state. It was a mature male adult dolphin. We suspect that it could have died of starvation, drowning or an infection,” Thejaswini said.
Reef Watch Marine Conservation has been monitoring marine animal strandings on beaches across the Karnataka coast since 2019. So far, it has worked on 213 cases involving dolphins, whale sharks, whales, turtles, sea snakes, seabirds and so on. It runs a similar project in Goa and has attended about 500 cases there.
