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Continued funding for UK strandings programme
 In 2006 the Marine Connection was horrified to discover the UK Government was planning to reduce funding for post-mortem examinations of cetaceans that wash up dead around the UK. Many of the individuals washed ashore in the winter months never make it to post-mortem, despite their fresh condition, due to the veterinary laboratories working at maximum capacity already - the cause of death in these individuals is never known. Therefore it was not only the analysis of cetacean bycatch which we risked losing through these financial cuts, but also valuable information such as disease, contaminant burdens, genetic status of populations and feeding ecology, through stomach content analysis. We could have also lost the possible unknown discovery - of a new disease, new bycatch as new fisheries develop - a change in population status.
Marine Connection asked its supporters to help campaign to change this decision and get the funding of post-mortem examinations increased again. Whilst we are delighted to report that scientists from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) who carry out the post mortems have now received a grant of over £1million from Defra and Welsh Assembly Government to continue investigating the strandings, the number of post mortems conducted, will sadly, still be restricted to specified quota. The grant will fund ZSL to lead the UK Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme (CSIP) for the next three years. Scottish Agricultural College, Inverness (SAC), the Natural History Museum (NHM) and Marine Environmental Monitoring (MEM) are partners in the CSIP undertaking work in specific regions of the UK.
Around 750 stranded cetaceans are reported annually in the UK and the renewed funding will ensure that the national cetacean and turtle strandings databases and tissue banks will continue to support a broad range of scientific research activity. Over the past fifteen years, the CSIP has identified a number of significant phenomena in UK stranded cetaceans, including bycatch in porpoises and dolphins, a correlation between infectious disease and high levels of pollutants in porpoises, violent and fatal interactions between bottlenose dolphins and harbour porpoises and, most recently, discovered a decompression sickness-like condition predominantly in deep-diving cetaceans.
For the first time, the CSIP will also begin to investigate incidences of basking shark strandings in the UK.
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