Over 30 dolphins die after being trapped by fast-moving ice pack near Carbonear
More than 30 dolphins died near Carbonear over the weekend after they were penned in by the fast-moving sea ice that surrounded much of Newfoundland over the past week.
A similar situation developed in Heart's Delight-Islington earlier this month, when fast-acting residents helped rescue more than a dozen dolphins from the ice pack.
Residents of the Carbonear area, along with fisheries officers and members of non-profit group Whale Release and Strandings mounted a similar rescue effort on Saturday but weren't able to free the animals.
"These animals, they just keep moving with open water, and when they run out of open water they're forced up on shore or in the pack ice, which kills them," Wayne Ledwell of Whale Release and Strandings said Monday.
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Ledwell said the rescue effort was in progress by the time he and his team arrived. He said dolphins don't have a lot of time once they're out of the water and groups of people were using sleds and tarps in trying to move the stranded animals to nearby open water.
"They took a bunch of them out of Carbonear and put them into clear water in Harbour Grace but then the next day the ice came back in there," he said.
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Ledwell said he wasn't sure if the dolphins found in Carbonear were part of the same pod that had been trapped in Heart's Delight-Islington.
"There was 30-odd that died down in Carbonear. We didn't even know there was that many there," he said.
"We thought there was five, or six or seven of them that were in the ice there but when the ice cleared away a lot of them had died, we just didn't see them. The ice had covered them over."
Ledwell said it was a tough weekend but there wasn't much anyone could have done.
Even if rescuers could get out to where the pod was stranded, he said, the sea ice is too dangerous.
The ice has since pushed out of the bay, opening up the small area of water needed for the dolphins' survival.
Dolphins getting stuck in sea ice is a fairly regular occurrence, said Ledwell.
"It's been happening here forever," he said, adding it's not just a problem for dolphins. "It kills blue whale and humpback whales and whatever gets into it."
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This article was originally published for CBC News. Contains files from The St. John's Morning Show.
Thumbnail credit: File photo of a dolphin fin used for illustration purposes only. Pixabay/itsystems-muc.
