CLEARWATER, Fla. — On Monday, Clearwater Marine Aquarium announced the passing of one of their bottlenose dolphins. Apollo, rescued from Playalinda Beach, next to The Kennedy Space Center, back in 2021. The dolphin was only four years old but had health issues. When he was rescued, he had significant hearing loss.
The Aquarium said in a statement its veterinarian team was monitoring Apollo since March. The Dolphin was acting strangely. Apollo appeared to show signs of discomfort for months.
CMA said their dedicated veterinary and animal care teams closely monitored and modified Apollo’s diet and regimen. He was showing signs of progress until Monday when his health appeared to decline again. A necropsy is now scheduled to determine how the dolphin died.
Apollo would mark five dolphin deaths at CMA in just under 20 months. It's unusual.
Back in March, the aquarium hired an expert panel to review their procedures, environment, and water quality at the rescue organization. The full report was released on Wednesday.
The review team consisted of:
● Two American College of Zoological Medicine Board-certified (Aquatic) veterinarians with a combined cetacean experience of 55 years
● A cetacean animal manager with over 30 years of experience
● A water quality expert with over 40 years of experience
● An animal welfare lawyer with 34 years of cetacean and regulatory experience
In the report, they said, there were no identified environmental or water quality issues.
The review stated:
"Based on the assessment, the review team found in nearly all situations, the Clearwater Marine Aquarium veterinary staff and the animal care team appeared to adapt, respond quickly and reasonably to the case presentations, reaching out extensively to appropriate veterinary colleagues and pivoting as the cases evolved. In addition, there were no identified environmental or water quality issues that contributed to their demise. Winter was rescued as a two-month old calf with serious injuries resulting in the loss of her tail flukes. Due to her young age and disability, Winter would not have survived without CMA’s rescue efforts. The other two bottlenose dolphins, Hemingway and PJ were rescued at rather old ages (mid-30s and later 40s). Hemingway had serious respiratory issues and hearing loss, PJ had significant hearing loss. The rough-toothed dolphin, Rex, suffered from aspiration and fungal pneumonia during his initial rehab and had severe hearing loss impacting his echolocation. PJ, Hemmingway and Rex all had significant hearing loss."
The report does not mention Apollo because it was completed before Apollo's death.
In memory of Apollo 🐬💙 pic.twitter.com/2hHAI60OJy
— Clearwater Aquarium (@CMAquarium) June 13, 2023
The report went on to make several recommendations, including looking at air quality in the aquarium, testing noise levels, refining their communication methods, investing in electronic recording systems, and more.
Here is a summary of the recommendations.
Recommendations:
● Healthy dolphin population and social group (including older dolphin “role models”)
● Animal behavior observations and monitoring
● Environment
● Refocus the veterinary team on medical care rather than admin or other tasks.
● Staffing
● Communication
You can read the full recommendations broken down step by step here:
CMA Executive Summary by ABC Action News on Scribd
The CEO, Joe Handy, has since responded in a statement, saying they are taking the recommendations very seriously and will be taking action on them immediately.
"Based on the assessment, the review team found that in nearly all situations, Clearwater Marine Aquarium worked diligently through these very challenging cases involving dolphins that arrived at the Aquarium with significantly compromised conditions. The Clearwater Marine Aquarium veterinary staff and the animal care team appeared to adapt, respond quickly and reasonably to the case presentations, reaching out extensively to appropriate veterinary colleagues and pivoting as the cases evolved. In addition, there were no identified environmental or water quality issues that contributed to the dolphins’ passing."
You can read the full statement here.
Going forward, the panel also said they would like, "to do an assessment of survival rates of stranded animals in managed care based on categories such as species as well as age and condition at time of stranding."
The panel said, "This would enable more thoughtful evaluation of the recent mortalities in context and might also help advance rescue, rehab and care programs at CMA and elsewhere."
