Passport to Texas

Passport to Texas from Texas Parks and Wildlife and the Sport Fish and Wildlife Restoration Program

More than one-hundred marine mammals a year strand on Texas beaches and most of them die. The Texas Marine Mammal Stranding Network tries to figure out why. The network covers the entire Texas Coastline in efforts to save the few mammals that strand alive.

Even though we’re based in Galveston, we have six different regions across the state. When we do get animals in, we’ll rehab them either in Corpus Christi or in Galveston depending on where they strand.

Lindsey Godlove is a volunteer with the Network. We caught up with her at Parks and Wildlife Expo.

We do get, just mostly dolphins and whales. Not the bigger whales, we get some of the smaller ones. We’ve had sperm whales before and kogias, which are pygmy sperm whales. The most of what we get, ninety percent, are bottle nosed dolphins. We get some interesting species like striped dolphins or rough tooth dolphins, things like that.

The Network believes dolphins and whales can tell us about what is going on in the oceans.

Since, obviously, that’s their environment. We can kind of tell when they do come in and we run tests on them maybe what bio-toxins and things like that are going on in the ocean and that can help us in other areas of research. We work with other agencies to help figure out what’s going on in the ocean at that time.

Learn how to volunteer with the Marine Mammal Stranding Network at passporttotexas.org.

That’s our show…the Sport Fish and Wildlife Restoration Program supports our series …we had research and writing help from Kate Lipinski… For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.
_____________________________________________________________________

How to Volunteer with the Texas Mammal Stranding Network

The next volunteer training day will be held February 2nd, 2008. Contact tmmsn at tamug.edu or call the State Office at (409)740-4455 if you would like to attend.

Texas Mammal Stranding Network Play Now | Play in Popup | Download