First Responders of the Marine Kind

With 149 kilometres of coastline, the city of dreams is also a city by the sea. Its original name ‘Bombay’, in fact, derives from bom bahia or ‘the good bay’. Mumbai’s ample coast forms a range of different habitat types – ranging from mudflats to mangroves – and is home to a fantastic variety of marine life forms. Earlier this year, the initiative Marine Life of Mumbai was launched to explore and celebrate the treasures on Mumbai’s shores. 

But every once in awhile – not too often, but often enough to cause concern – other things wash up on Mumbai’s shores. On a rainy afternoon in Bandra last month, a diverse group of over 40 volunteers, marine biologists as well as officials from the Mangrove cell of the Forest Department had gathered to discuss what they could do about a recent spate of turtle strandings. The very same day, they received a call about a dead Bryde’s Whale that had washed up ashore in Colaba, and they took that as a sign to go beyond turtle strandings to all marine strandings in and around Mumbai. Spread across the city, this Marine Respondents’ team would be in a good position to act as first responders in case of a stranding in the future, with specific areas and beaches divided up between them. They decided to also involve fishermen, hawkers, policemen and others who were more likely to be around the beach when an incident took place. 

You may wonder why a citizens’ initiative is needed in the first place. Shouldn’t this be left up to experts or the authorities? The governmental responsibility for strandings falls upon the Forest Department, but  it is not always possible for the officers to be there fast enough and critical time is lost. Volunteers and vets have been assigned beaches close to where they live so they can be there in a matter of minutes. 

And unfortunately, there is almost no protocol for such situations. Since 2015, there have been 77 strandings of whales, dugongs, dolphins and porpoises along Indian shores, not counting strandings of smaller animals; in most cases, the animals were found dead or died during the rescue process.

In what is now an infamous stranding incident, when a Blue Whale was beached in Alibaug in June 2015, fishermen and forest department officials spent ten hours attempting to take her back to the sea. At the end of those ten hours, the whale succumbed to her situation, while the Forest Department mourned their lack of preparation to deal with a live stranding. Concerned passers-by, meanwhile, spent their time milling around and taking selfies on (yes, on) the dead animal.

With the institution of groups such as Mumbai’s Marine Respondents’ team, and other measures such as the establishment of the city’s first Marine Rescue Centre at Juhu (which will be ready in a couple of months), it looks like both civil society and the Forest Department are finally teaming up to address this head on. 

If the right measures are taken, and taken swiftly, the chances of survival for smaller animals that are stranded, such as turtles, are higher. But for larger marine mammals, on-site treatment is the only realistic way. In many cases, this too will fail. Once they are beached, the organs of large mammals such as whales collapse under their own weight, making them too weak to swim out and surface to breathe, even if they reach the water. They can often drown even when they’re beached, if rising tides swell up enough to cover the blowhole. 

An animal, or a group of animals, can stray away from their pods or groups for a variety of reasons – sickness, disorientation due to military sonar exercises, changing lunar tides or injury, to name just a few. The reason behind these strandings can best be ascertained by a timely and thorough medical examination of the stranded animal.  “But in India, very little priority is given to postmortem exams of stranded animals; the disposal of the carcass unfortunately remains the first priority,” said Abhishek Jamalabad, a marine biologist studying the interactions between marine mammal and fisheries off the coast of Karwar in Karnataka.

Pradip Patade, who has been documenting and exploring inter-tidal zones in and around Mumbai for the past 25 years, added that better data collection – on the time and location of the stranding, the species and the probable cause – would help us arrive at a better understanding of why these strandings occur, and how best to prevent or remedy them. 

Perhaps this is something that can now gradually happen via collaboration between citizen-driven networks and the authorities.

Cover photograph by Pradip Patade