400 dead dolphins wash up off Zanzibar

HUNDREDS of dead dolphins washed up yesterday along the shore of a popular tourist destination on Zanzibar’s northern coast, and scientists ruled out poisoning.

It was not immediately clear what killed the 400 dolphins, whose carcasses were strewn along a four-kilometre stretch of Nungwi, said Narriman Jidawi, a marine biologist at the Institute of Marine Science in Zanzibar.

But the bottleneck dolphins, which live in deep offshore waters, had empty stomachs, meaning that they could have been disoriented and were swimming for some time to reorient themselves. They did not starve to death and were not poisoned, Mr Jidawi said.

In the US, experts were investigating the possibility that sonar from US submarines could have been responsible for a similar incident in Marathon, Florida, where 68 deep-water dolphins stranded themselves in March 2005.

A US Navy task force patrols the East Africa coast as part of counter-terrorism operations. A Navy official was not available for comment, but the service rarely comments on the location of submarines at sea.

The deaths are a blow to the tourism industry in Zanzibar, where thousands of visitors go to watch and swim with wild dolphins, said Abdulsamad Melhi, owner of a hotel which overlooks the beach.

Villagers, fishermen and hotel residents found the carcasses and alerted officials.

Zanzibar’s director of fisheries Mussa Aboud Jumbe went on state radio to warn the public against eating the dolphins’ meat, saying the cause of death had not been determined.

But residents who did eat the dolphins’ meat early yesterday were all doing fine, Mr Jidawi said.

The Indo-Pacific bottlenose, humpback and spinner porpoises, commonly known as dolphins, are the most common species in Zanzibar’s coastal waters.