Dr. Moby Solangi, the executive director of the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies (IMMS) in Gulfport, Miss., splashes water onto the skin of a melon-headed whale on Monday, Sept. 5, 2017. The whale was brought to the IMMS for treatment after being found beached on Alabama's Fort Morgan Peninsula on Saturday. (Lawrence Specker/LSpecker@AL.com)
"He's very sick," says Dr. Moby Solangi, approaching the tank containing a small whale rescued from an Alabama shoreline over the weekend. And the whale looks it, even to the untrained eye.
The animal floats inertly in its hospital room, which looks like a big industrial version of the kind of above-ground pool you could buy at Walmart. Its torso rides high but its tail droops down to the bottom of the tank and it bobs stiffly, like a log. But every 30 seconds or so there's a sharp chuff of air from its blowhole, almost like a cough. Occasionally the long torso flexes slightly.
Solangi, the executive director of the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies (IMMS) in Gulfport, Miss., said he hasn't allowed the staff to name its patient yet.
"We will not name it until we know this animal has a chance of making it," he said. "We want to be prudent. We don't want to raise peoples' hopes."
It is a melon-headed whale, and if you're not familiar with the species, don't feel bad. Solangi said that in a 40-year career working with dolphins, turtles and other marine life, this is the first he's seen. It was found beached on Alabama's Fort Morgan Peninsula on Saturday, two days after another melon-headed whale was found on the beach nearby.
The first one, reportedly a female, didn't survive. But rescuers - including volunteers from the Fort Morgan Fire and Rescue department, someone from the Orange Beach Wildlife Center and Alabama Marine Stranding Network staff from the Dauphin Island Sea Lab --- got this one off the beach and on the road. Solangi says that at 8 feet, 2 inches and 300 pounds, it's an adult male big enough to be the dominant male in a pod.
Rescuers from the IMMS met the Alabama group in Foley, says IMMS staff member Lauren Cooley. There they transferred the whale to a truck with some specialized equipment to ease the shock of transportation.
"It was a very difficult transport, and if it wasn't done right, he wouldn't have made it," Solangi says. He still considers the whale to be in critical condition.
A melon-headed whale being treated at the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Gulfport, Miss., has several small wounds, including one forward and to the right of its blowhole. Dr. Moby Solangi of the IMMS says some of the wounds are bites, a sign the sick animal had lost the ability to defend itself from small predators. (Lawrence Specker/LSpecker@AL.com)
The charity organization Whale and Dolphin Conservation says melon-headed whales are "actually a member of the dolphin family. They are usually found far offshore beyond the continental shelf and only come close to shore when the surrounding waters are deep. Very little is known about them except from a few places where they are commonly encountered - the Philippines and Hawaii - and from stranding records."
Solangi stresses that these are a far cry from the dolphins one might usually see off Alabama beaches or up in Mobile Bay. Their natural habitat is 100 or 150 miles offshore, were the bottom drops from hundreds of feet to thousands. Any melon-headed whale that washes up on a Gulf Coast beach is a long, long way from home.
As to what forced this one so far, Solangi can only speculate. It might have started with illness. He believes that "strandings are a phenomenon that marine mammals use to respond to sickness and injury." A sick animal might be escorted into the shallows by its pod, or it might deliberately quarantine itself from them.
Or it might have started with disruption. Hurricane Harvey's passage through the Gulf might have been the trigger. Or maybe it has something to do with the low-oxygen "dead zone" in the Gulf. Fueled by fertilizers and other chemicals carried by the Mississippi River, it's larger than ever this year and could be impacting the whales' habitat, Solangi speculates.
Or maybe it's a combination of things that snowballed, leaving this whale disoriented and - to judge from small bite injuries on its hide -- increasingly unable to defend itself. "There's a cascading effect of events," Solangi says.
Treatment consists of a shotgun approach of things that might help any sickly mammal: Antibiotics to help with respiratory and gastrointestinal infection; steroids to ease the trauma of the overland trip; hand-feeding; and freshwater funneled down the animal's throat, to help with dehydration.
Yes, dehydration. Solangi says that such whales get all their water from their food. A whale that can't fend for itself doesn't just go hungry, it goes thirsty. There's no textbook for diagnosis and treatment: "In my mind this is a very tough case, in that we don't know a lot about melon-headed whales," says Solangi.
Dr. Moby Solangi of the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Gulfport, Miss., displays a young Kemp's Ridley sea turtle. The IMMS regularly nurses injured turtles back to health before returning them to the Gulf of Mexico. (Lawrence Specker/LSpecker@AL.com)
"We have to assist it with everything," he said. That includes understanding that aside from whatever ails it, the whale also has to adapt to being touched and to being confined. "You've got to think about it from their perspective," Solangi says.
One thing the whale has going for it is that IMMS staff have some experience at this. In 2015, they took in two pygmy killer whales stranded in Mississippi. The pygmies are another deepwater dolphin species about which relatively little is known, and it wasn't easy nursing them back to health. "It was up and down, up and down," Solangi says of their care, and it was 10 months before they could be turned loose.
But he considers the pygmies a great triumph. When they went back into the wild they carried radio tags. Data showed the whales rapidly returning to their home, and frequently diving to depths of 1,000 to 2,000 feet for eight or nine minutes at a time. The transmitter batteries only lasted a couple of months, "but that's a month or two more than we knew," Solangi says of the knowledge gained.
That's his best-case scenario for the melon-headed whale found in Alabama: a return to the wild, and a new window into the life of a "rare and novel species."
That's one of two possible outcomes, obviously. "It's a win-win for science," Solangi says, meaning scientists will learn even if the patient dies, "but it may not be a win for the species."
"A stranded animal is a black box for the environment," Solangi says. When whales are recovered after death, decomposition affects the evidence of what killed them. An animal found alive can potentially tell scientists more.
"All I can say is, the Gulf of Mexico is under severe stress," Solangi says. "I believe that the BP oil spill was a wakeup call."
If such strandings increase, they could be an indicator of problems out there where the water gets deep. Solangi describes cases like this as "flares" because they might not be a few isolated cases - they might just be the "lucky ones" that make it all the way to shores where they can be rescued. "The two that you see may be a fraction of what has happened," he says. "That's the unknown."
There are many unknowns. Despite rescuers' good intentions, there's no guarantee they can lessen the animal's suffering. But they have to try, Solangi says. There's a principal involved, regardless of just how rare this whale actually is.
"If we don't intervene, it's dead," he says. "Maybe nature wants it to be dead. But some species are so endangered that every individual you save can help the species rebound."