Dead Dolphins

Hundreds of bottlenose dolphins have washed up on the beaches of Zanzibar, an island along the lower east coast of Africa. Originally there were "only" 200 estimated dead, but in the few hours since the first articles were put online, the estimates have gone to twice that. No one is sure what caused the mass beaching. One of the locals commented, "“We started noticing them last night...We could do nothing but photograph them."

Four hundred dead dolphins. Sounds like a lot, doesn't it? The bottlenose species, the most common in the Zanzibar area, is normally a deep-water breed. No one yet knows what brought them to die on the shore. All the carcasses necropsied so far have had empty stomachs. However, scientists say that the dolphins did not starve to death, and as the empty stomachs show, they were not poisoned. Nariman Jidawi, a researcher at a Zanzibar institution of marine research, also ruled out oil pollution. (So far, none of the locals who have eaten meat off the dolphins have gotten sick either...)

So, what killed the dolphins? No one knows yet, but you have to worry when 400+ wash up on the shores. It seems a bit odd that that many dolphins all get disoriented at once. One possible culprit is sonar, which has been blamed for mass beachings before; but at this point, there is no certainty either way.