email interview reply
1. There are many reasons why seals may need to be rescued, this can be illness, severe injury, malnutrition, entanglement in marine litter and very young pups that have been separated from their mother too soon. cetaceans can have similar reasons why they become stranded, this can include tidal confusion, being coaught out by estruaries and harbours.
most injured sels can be sent to a rehabilitation centre however there are no places in cornwall at the moment to rehabilitate cetaceans, so those are normally helped on the beach they are found on.
2. In Cornwall, Cornwall Wildlife Trust Marine Strandings Network - they have a team of trained volunteers that can be called on to record the bodies through taking measurements, photos and noting any interesting marks, injuries, signs of infection and so on. If suitable, the bodies can also be taken for post mortem examination by a veterinary pathologist who can determine things such as cause of death and take many samples for further health testing as well as for research purposes by other scientists.
3.Large whales can become stranded for a number of different reasons such as ill health, severe injury, or sometimes even navigational error when close to shore as they are less familiar with tides and coastlines. They can be much harder to deal with as we cannot move them due to their size and weight, but also because they have never evolved to support their own bodyweight on land they also begin to slowly crush themselves as soon as they are stuck on land, which gives us a very limited amount of time before the damage internally has become so severe that they will not survive.
4.As with many of these cases, it was very difficult to deal with the fin whale's situation on t due to the distressing situation it was alive, and there was actually very little we could do. However it was actually very quick and easy to decide what would happen with it pretty much from the very beginning. Shortly after receiving the phone call alerting us to the stranding, I received photos from the scene which showed the animal to be stranded on the high tide mark. Checking the tide times for that afternoon I could tell that the animal had already been out of the water for approximately two hours and it would be at least another nine hours before tide would come back in enough to be anywhere close to lifting its weight so it could move again. Sadly this is far too much time for an animal of this size to be stranded for and, as mentioned in the previous question, too much crush damage will have been done internally for it to survive. As it turned out, when we arrived on the scene it was very obvious the animal was dying already, and we confirmed that it had passed away about 45 minutes later just as after our veterinarian arrived.
5.We are actually very lucky in Cornwall to have a wide range of very amazing habitats and species to support healthy populations of plants and animals in our coastal marine environment - some of the best in the UK that the large majority of people who live here do not have regular access to like ourselves! Of course, having good populations of so many species means that we do see higher numbers of animals washing ashore dead compared to many other areas of the country - in fact Cornwall contributes to approximately 25% of all recorded dead cetaceans in England alone. The Cornwall Wildlife Trust Marine Strandings Network actually produces an annual report with local figures for all species of marine mammal that have been recorded by them, and you can find their 2018 report on this link here for more information:
most injured sels can be sent to a rehabilitation centre however there are no places in cornwall at the moment to rehabilitate cetaceans, so those are normally helped on the beach they are found on.
2. In Cornwall, Cornwall Wildlife Trust Marine Strandings Network - they have a team of trained volunteers that can be called on to record the bodies through taking measurements, photos and noting any interesting marks, injuries, signs of infection and so on. If suitable, the bodies can also be taken for post mortem examination by a veterinary pathologist who can determine things such as cause of death and take many samples for further health testing as well as for research purposes by other scientists.
3.Large whales can become stranded for a number of different reasons such as ill health, severe injury, or sometimes even navigational error when close to shore as they are less familiar with tides and coastlines. They can be much harder to deal with as we cannot move them due to their size and weight, but also because they have never evolved to support their own bodyweight on land they also begin to slowly crush themselves as soon as they are stuck on land, which gives us a very limited amount of time before the damage internally has become so severe that they will not survive.
4.As with many of these cases, it was very difficult to deal with the fin whale's situation on t due to the distressing situation it was alive, and there was actually very little we could do. However it was actually very quick and easy to decide what would happen with it pretty much from the very beginning. Shortly after receiving the phone call alerting us to the stranding, I received photos from the scene which showed the animal to be stranded on the high tide mark. Checking the tide times for that afternoon I could tell that the animal had already been out of the water for approximately two hours and it would be at least another nine hours before tide would come back in enough to be anywhere close to lifting its weight so it could move again. Sadly this is far too much time for an animal of this size to be stranded for and, as mentioned in the previous question, too much crush damage will have been done internally for it to survive. As it turned out, when we arrived on the scene it was very obvious the animal was dying already, and we confirmed that it had passed away about 45 minutes later just as after our veterinarian arrived.
5.We are actually very lucky in Cornwall to have a wide range of very amazing habitats and species to support healthy populations of plants and animals in our coastal marine environment - some of the best in the UK that the large majority of people who live here do not have regular access to like ourselves! Of course, having good populations of so many species means that we do see higher numbers of animals washing ashore dead compared to many other areas of the country - in fact Cornwall contributes to approximately 25% of all recorded dead cetaceans in England alone. The Cornwall Wildlife Trust Marine Strandings Network actually produces an annual report with local figures for all species of marine mammal that have been recorded by them, and you can find their 2018 report on this link here for more information:
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