I woke up around 7am. I was planning on cleaning the house and then attending fireworks in the evening. That's when I got the call from the British Divers Marine Life Rescue. They had reports from Her Majesty's Coastguard that there were 12 dolphins stranded on the coast in Fife. I quickly finished what I was doing before hoping into my car, driving to the Delkeith Police Station to pick up the Edinburgh's rescue kit, and drove to the rescue site (approximately 1.5 hours away). I arrived on scene roughly at 9am.
When I arrived, there were about 5 marine medics already there. The Dundee coordinator was there, and in charge of the scene. HM Coastguard and Fife police were controlling the public. I was the first veterinary related individual on scene. Jo, a vet and clinician at the vet school arrived about 5 minutes after me. She and I got suited up in dry suits and headed down to the scene. It turned out that the dolphins where actually pilot whales.
Now the term whales and dolphins are a bit vague. The pilot whale is actually considered a dolphin, just like the killer whale is a dolphin too. They pilot whale ranges in sizes of 3.5 to 6.5 meters (11-20 feet) and weight between 1 and 5 metric tonnes (2200 - 11023 pounds). They are very social animals and live in pods of 10 to 60 individuals.
The pod had stranded on a rocky beach in front of a cliff face. This was a blessing in a few ways. Firstly, it helped controlled public access to the whales. Secondly, protected us from wind in one direction. It added the difficulty of bringing down the rescue kit. There were pilot whales everywhere. They were lying about in all directions, some on top of others. One rescuer was quoted as saying it was like a plane crash.
When Jo and I get down to the beach, the medics on hand were ready to upright one whale. You need to get a whale on its belly, so it is not crushing one of its lungs. We aided in this task.
Jo and I then started to go about the grim task of triaging the pilot whales to determine which ones were suitable for rescue. After 30 minutes, another vet student and a local vet (who I had worked with before in regular practice) arrived. The vet was quickly trained up on the basics of marine mammal medicine by Jo.
This is a photo of the BBC's website after I arrived home. In the photo I am the rescuer in the top left, and the other is the other veterinary student. We were taking the respiration rates from different whales.
By this time we had known that only 13 whales were alive out of the 26 that had stranded. Then, we get word that there were another 20 stranded up the coast. Jo left to check that scene out, leaving me, the local vet, and the other vet student to continue to assess the whales.
The plan of the rescue, upright they whales that can be, provide first aid to them, and wait for high tide. Then they can be placed on pontoons and floated back into the sea. High tide was not for another eight hours. A grim reality we had to face was that whales of the size of pilot whales start to suffer internal organ damage after being on land for 8-12 hours, and they had beached themselves approximately 2 hours before we arrived.
Over the next few hours not much changed. The vet and I determined which whales needed to be the focus of the rescue and up-righted first if they had any chance of living. It was about this time that Fife Fire and Rescue arrived and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution arrived to help. It was great, they brought manpower and hoses. One of the most important things in a whale/dolphin rescue is keeping the animal wet. They are built to be in very cold water, and they quickly overheat on land.
Jo returned with good news that the other pod had not stranded, but was swimming in shallow water. That pod was now being observed in case they strand.
Two other vets arrived, and helped distribute the load of monitoring the whales. Sadly, there is not much you can do for a whale of this size in terms of medicine. To euthanize, you need to use a drug that is 1000 times strong than morphine and a single drop on a mucus membrane (such as the eye) is enough to kill a human within minutes.
Time continued and more marine medics arrived. In the end, there were about 35 marine mammal medics, 25 other rescue personnel (RNLS/HM Coastguard/Fire and Rescue/ Police), and about 250 public members watching from the cliff. I continued to assess the whales and report to the vets with any changing conditions. Around 3pm, I finally took a 10 minute break. It was nice. The public, sad they could not help, had donated sandwiches, fruits, and bottles of water.
Eventually the tide came in around 4:30pm, and we refloated 10 of the whales. Refloating whales is a huge task. First you have to get a tarp under the whales. You then inflate pontoons around the whale and attach the tarps to the pontoons. When the water comes in, you can then deflate the pontoons and take hold of the whale. Then you keep hold of the whale while the others are refloated. This is done for a number of reasons. First, if you release a pilot whale alone during a mass stranding, it will return to the group and restrand due to their social bonds. Secondly, the whales after being on land all day suffer from problems with floating on its own. This corrects usually after about 1/2 hour. Thirdly, a vet should determine if the animal is healthy enough to survive without contributing any diseases to the wild population. One died during the process of refloating. Two were determined to be not suitable for rescue due to their location and position of stranding; they had become stuck between large rocks. Finally, around 6pm, they were released. I was exhausted.
Below is a video from the helmet of the RNLI rescuers. You can see me starting around 30 seconds into it. I am the one with the stethoscope.
I met during the rescue one of the pathologist for the Scottish Agriculture College. He invited me to assist with the necropsy of the dead whales. Because of the number and size of the whales, the necropsies had to be done on scene. But since the tide was coming in, and the light was fading, it didn't start until the next day.
I arrived at 9:30am the next day. The pathologist were on the beach already. They were collecting blubber, skin, and muscle samples from the dead whales. The Fife Council had hired a recovery crew to bring in a crane to winch up the whale up to the fields on the cliff. Once there, they performed the necropsies. It took two days to go through all of the whales. It was a great learning experience. I stayed "clean" so that I could label the sample jars and write notes. I met the main marine mammal pathologist of the entire UK (they brought up the Welsh and English teams to help with it). Made a few good connections, which I intend to use to bring speakers to my fellow vet students!
Here are some photos:
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| This is the crew bringing up the whales. Yes, the news was there filming this too. |
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| One was pregnant, this is the foetus. |
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| This is a nice view on the inside of one whale. That is one of the pathologist holding the foetus to other biology students. |
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