The Rhino with Glue-On Shoes (22 page)

Brass grew quite accustomed to our visits. In the past, he'd always been a bit shy, more timid than the other lemurs. Now he seemed to enjoy an occasional scratch on the back. Every time I looked at him, I searched for something I'd missed. When I scratched his back, I'd feel his vertebrae and gauge his body condition; I'd gradually move my hands toward his head and touch his swollen face, hoping for fresh inspiration.

But the weeks slipped by, and instead of finding answers, I was increasingly forced to face defeat. Karen felt that Brass was beginning to go downhill quickly. We found him curled up near the warmth of the heat lamp more frequently, and what appeared to be a sprained pinky finger escalated into a hand so swollen that his skin began to split. Brass also began losing weight, despite special food supplements.

As I watched Brass one day, Karen and I talked about his degree of suffering and his increasingly poor prognosis. Without mentioning the word “euthanasia,” I knew we felt the same way. We hated to give up hope, but we didn't want Brass to continue suffering from something he would not overcome. The zoo's head vet, Cindy, and I discussed the matter with our technicians; everyone agreed, as did the other primate keepers, the curator, and the zoo director. It was a Friday. We decided that if Brass did not show improvement from our latest treatments by the following week, we wouldn't let him suffer any longer.

When I talked to my mom that weekend, I hated telling her the news. She expressed concern, knowing how much I'd wanted to save Brass. She'd been pulling for him too, and I wondered if it bothered her to find me admitting defeat against problems that were vaguely similar to her own.

Monday, my day off, I got a message from Cindy saying that Brass had really deteriorated and they'd decided to euthanize him. Although I'd hoped to be there, I didn't want him to suffer and was glad they were going to help him in the only way left to them.

Once the battle was over, all I could hope for was some sort of answer from the examination of his body so that we could keep this from happening to another lemur. We sent many samples to the pathologist for tests and microscopic evaluation—and waited. Two weeks later, I received the report I mentioned earlier: nothing.

Before I began writing Brass's story, I retrieved his medical chart, intending to refer to it to recall time frames and treatments more accurately. Instead, I found myself wrapped up in the case all over again, reviewing clinical entries and lab reports from start to finish, and trying once more to find something I'd missed. His case affected me on a personal level more than most. This gentle lemur suffered from a complex disease that we never figured out. The harsh reality is that we don't always find the answer in zoo medicine—or in human medicine.

As for my mom, her story is thankfully taking a different turn. Six months after starting immunoglobulin therapy, she began to notice subtle improvements. A year after that, still on the monthly immunoglobulin treatments, she was finally well enough to visit me and the Pittsburgh Zoo. Copper and the other lemurs were some of her first photographic subjects in over two years.

I will always wonder about what happened to Brass and why, and I will always wonder if a different course of treatment could have changed the outcome. When I stop wondering, I suppose that's when I'll stop growing as a veterinarian.

Baker D

by Marty Haulena, DVM, MSc

W
hat's best for a stranded bottlenose dolphin? Why do they end up on the beach in the first place? How can we improve their chances of survival when we first rescue them? And how do we know where and how to release them if they survive their initial rehabilitation? These questions, along with our best efforts to answer them, occupied a great many discussions among The Marine Mammal Center staff and volunteers in Sausalito, California.

Most stranded cetaceans (dolphins, porpoises, and whales) die in the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours after rescue. The cause of death is often a chain of problems that begin the moment the animal finds itself on the beach. No longer suspended in water, it suffers from the weight of its own body. Not only does a stranded dolphin have difficulty breathing, its skin and muscles bruise quickly from pressure on the hard ground.

Biochemically, the animal begins to suffer too. A series of chemical changes are triggered by the dolphin's stress reaction to being out of water in a foreign environment. If it could, the dolphin would struggle or flee—the fight-or-flight reaction that is universal among mammals in stressful situations, fueled by the chemical epinephrine, or adrenaline. Unable to move, the dolphin's epinephrine builds to an excessively high level, which then damages the muscles further. Since the heart is one of the largest muscles in the body, the chemical becomes life-threatening rather than lifesaving.

Recent advances in our understanding of the physiological changes going on inside a stranded dolphin have helped our rescue efforts at the Center, and we've improved our success rate over the last decade or so. By the time Baker D arrived, in September 2004, we had better techniques for transport, stabilization, diagnostic procedures, and therapy. But supporting a stranded animal all the way back to a successful release into the wild was still a very rare event.

We put all of our knowledge to work when this young male dolphin came in. Lifeguards had found him stranded on Baker D Beach, and named him accordingly. They carried him on a stretcher to the nearest parking lot, where I first met this special dolphin. Already weak and unable to move, Baker D watched wide-eyed as we scrambled around him. I wondered what he thought of these noisy, unfamiliar humans poking and prodding him. A young male, he was alert and had relatively few wounds despite the time he'd spent on dry land. We knew his chances of survival were pretty good, all things considered. But the helpless dolphin, completely out of his element, had no idea what would happen next.

People often try to help stranded dolphins by pushing them back into the water, only to have them re-strand and eventually die. They don't understand that the stress of stranding has created a host of new problems that threaten its survival, in or out of the water. At least Baker D would escape that fate. We would carefully stabilize him; if he made it, we would begin the long process of rehabilitation. Though I knew the odds were probably against us, I felt that Baker D was a strong candidate for eventual release. Whatever the outcome, we would learn something from the case.

We started supportive therapy right away, first by injecting Baker D with a general sedative. We placed a catheter into a vein in his tail fluke so we could give him a variety of IV drugs, including more sedative (Valium), corticosteroids, antibiotics, and propranolol, a drug that would lower the dolphin's heart rate and protect the heart tissue. Then we hooked up a rehydration fluid drip for his transport to The Marine Mammal Center, a relatively short thirty-minute drive.

Staff had readied a soft-sided pool for Baker D, twenty-four feet in diameter and three and a half feet deep. With our lab technicians prepared to analyze the samples, we took blood for diagnostic and research purposes, including DNA testing, weighed him, and carefully moved him to the pool in a stretcher.

The moment we lowered the dolphin into the water, the real work began. Though the Center employs fifty people full-time, including three veterinarians, a group of about six hundred volunteers performs the bulk of the day-to-day hands-on animal care. These incredibly dedicated, caring people are essential to the critical care of stranded animals. Over the following weeks, they would nurse Baker D.

Initially, Baker D could neither swim nor support himself in the water. So our volunteers fashioned a special sling made of floats and neoprene to help keep him afloat. Two people at a time stood in the water with the dolphin to guide him gently around the pool, preventing him from listing or sinking and injuring himself. On that first day, I also stayed with him for several hours, monitoring him and helping to develop a treatment plan with the rest of our excellent veterinary team. The next day, Baker D already appeared stronger. Within a week, he'd progressed significantly: his appetite had picked up and he'd adjusted to the people caring for him. He was still very weak, however. We had a long way to go.

For the next several weeks, our volunteers nursed the dolphin around the clock, often standing for hours in the cold water and misty coastal air. They fed him regularly, dosed him with medication, and kept detailed records for every minute of the day for several weeks. No one voiced a complaint, only concern for the special patient under their care. I can't say enough about the outstanding group of volunteers that is the heart and soul of The Marine Mammal Center. These are people who always try to do the right thing, who strive to improve themselves and the world around them, who simply care.

Gradually, Baker D became able to navigate the small pool on his own. As he continued to gain strength, we knew he'd need a deeper pool where he could get more exercise and conditioning for a potential release. We called the Long Marine Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Cruz, whose staff graciously agreed to take Baker D and give him the space he needed. Another dedicated team of people took over his care. Though we'd all bonded to Baker D, this was a happy day. We were excited and proud to see a live animal leave the Center—on its way home.

Before long, Baker D was swimming in the big pool with speed and strength. It was time to plan for his release back to the wild. The first step was to review the conditions in which we'd found him initially.

Strandings often occur in areas where the coast slopes very gradually into shallow water, a geographic feature that makes echolocation, the system dolphins use to navigate, more difficult. Changes in sea level associated with global warming may play a role in the shallow-slope effect. Some believe noises associated with human activity, like boat engines, drilling, mining, and military operations, have a lot to do with strandings. Underwater noise may interfere with the dolphins' ability to navigate, damage their hearing, and even cause them to surface too quickly, resulting in “the bends.” A group of dolphins can also strand when the dominant animal in a group becomes disoriented and leads the rest of the pod to disaster.

Another possibility in Baker D's case—and our greatest concern from a medical point of view—was the presence of an infectious disease we hadn't been able to diagnose. If a bacterial or viral infection had sickened him and caused him to strand, the same disease could be a danger to other dolphins when he was released. Perhaps toxins, whether from human or natural sources, had affected him.

However, we'd found no evidence of any infection. No other dolphins had stranded at the same time; nor were there reports of any toxic spills during the period in question. Though there could have been other contributing factors, we believed that Baker D had simply made a mistake. A young, curious, and inexperienced male, maybe he'd ventured away from his pod hunting fish, unaware that he'd strayed too far. Maybe he'd gotten too close to shore and had been pummeled by waves onto the rocky beach. Or maybe he'd encountered an aggressive group of other dolphins or a potential predator that had chased him into the rough, shallow water.

Now we had what appeared to be a healthy dolphin living safely in a pool. How could we ensure we'd done our best to prepare him for a return to the ocean? Would he be able to find his pod?

We reviewed the established guidelines for releasing stranded dolphins. The animal should be in the best possible physical shape, free of diseases that might pose a danger to healthy wild animals; it should be fitted with a tracking device and released in the vicinity of members of the same species. We knew of a group of bottlenose dolphins that frequent Monterey Bay, coming close to shore at a certain stretch of beach almost every day. Our best guess was that Baker D belonged to this group of dolphins. So when, after two months of intense rehabilitation, we decided he was ready to go back to the wild, we made plans to release him in the bay.

On the day of his release, we fitted Baker D with both a VHF radio tag and a satellite-linked tag on his dorsal fin. These instruments are designed to detach themselves after approximately 250 to 300 days, their expected battery life. As soon as we spotted the group of wild dolphins, we headed out to sea by boat with Baker D safely aboard in a specially designed stretcher. About two hours later, we gently lowered the dolphin to the surface of the sea, positioning him to face the group of dolphins a hundred yards away. Once free of the stretcher, Baker D dove down, turned away from the other dolphins, swam under our boat, and disappeared under the water.

Our radio-tracking receiver picked up the sound from his VHF tag just once, as he porpoised out of the water—somewhere out of our sight. He swam away so fast that we never heard him again. Though his behavior was not what we'd expected, we were generally pleased with the outcome, proud to have completed such a rare but satisfying task. A job well done, or so we thought.

For the next few weeks, we received daily transmissions from Baker D's satellite-linked tag. Information about his location was transmitted to a satellite and then downloaded from the Internet to generate a map showing his precise postrelease travels. Initially, Baker D seemed to be heading north toward San Francisco. But then he turned around and moved very quickly southward, reaching the Channel Islands off Santa Barbara. He made this trip in a little over a week, a distance of approximately 280 miles.

We couldn't help wondering why Baker D had moved so rapidly away from the area that had seemed natural for him, populated by other bottlenose dolphins. Could he be disoriented? Had we missed a disease, one of those that can cause permanent brain damage?

Once near the Channel Islands, Baker D's signals showed that he moved only small distances and stayed very close to land. Three weeks after his release, he was barely moving from one day to the next. On day seventy-six after release, the satellite-linked transmitter sent its last transmission. Not a good sign. We began to assume the worst.

At the Center we reviewed the pattern of satellite-location signals. The data seemed to indicate that Baker D had died. The relative lack of movement could mean that he'd been floating lifeless in the water. Thereafter, his body would have sunk to the ocean floor.

We were devastated. The volunteers and staff of The Marine Mammal Center and Long Marine Laboratory, the lifeguards and boat operators—we'd all worked so hard to give Baker D the best care, make the best medical decisions, and create the best possible scenario for his successful release. We wondered what we could have done differently. Maybe we should have tried to find a home for him in an aquarium. Perhaps we should have released him sooner or rehabilitated him longer. Were there other diagnostics we could have performed to find out what was wrong with him?

Two weeks after the last satellite signal, the Center's marine biologist, Denise Greig, and a number of people from Long Marine Laboratory, including the lead husbandry manager, Brett Long, decided it was worth chartering a research flight to have a look for Baker D's body. They hoped to gain some—any—information about what had happened to him. Even if the satellite-linked transmitter had failed, perhaps the VHF radio transmitter was still functional and would lead them to his body if it had washed up onshore.

I wasn't on the plane, but Denise and Brett told me all about it:

It was a stormy February day when the plane set forth on its grim mission. The clouds were heavy with rain, the rough weather buffeting the plane. As the day wore on, the plane flew intersecting search patterns. The crew was quiet, concentrating and listening, intent on picking up even the faintest signal from the radio transmitters in their head-phones. Dusk was coming on and the fuel gauges showed the flight could not continue much longer.

Suddenly, the dark clouds parted and beams of golden sunshine shone down on the deep blue sea. Bright rays reflected off the peaks of the waves. A rainbow appeared in the late afternoon sky. The crew heard a faint “beep-beep-beep.” It stopped and started again. Then it got louder and clearer before disappearing again. Illuminated by glowing sunlight, a large group of bottlenose dolphins—250 or more—suddenly sprang into view, moving fast. Right in the center, broadcasting his signal loud and clear every time he cleared the surface of the water, swam Baker D.