A dead dolphin washed up on the North Beach of Dewees on Wednesday morning sometime. Alert beachwalkers notified Lori, and she called it in to the marine mammal stranding network, which falls under the NOAA fisheries division. Since it was late in the day on Wednesday, and a necropsy takes a few hours (and can’t be done in the dark), they scheduled a visit for Friday morning (Thursday was Thanskgiving). We went up to the north beach to check things out.

The dolphin seemed to be in fairly good condition, though it appeared to have been knocked around in the surf a bit. Patches of skin had worn off near the eye area, and some sort of parasitic worms were attached to the tail.

To us, it looked to be fairly young, and there were no obvious signs of shark attack, etc. We were struck by the fact that we couldn’t really tell the gender, and the dolphin has a lot of rather sharp teeth.