Group, federal officials at odds over dolphins

BRIGANTINE, N.J. - A marine-mammal rescue group wants plans drawn up soon to coax or scare from 15 to 20 dolphins out of a river near the Shore and back to sea, but federal wildlife officials are in no hurry.

Robert Schoelkopf, director of the Marine Mammal Stranding Center, is worried that the animals are getting too comfortable in a place where they cannot survive for long.

The dolphins have been in the Shrewsbury or Navesink Rivers in Monmouth County since early last month, possibly as a result of a wrong turn chasing schools of bait fish along the coast.

"We want them to come up with some kind of plan as we approach the fall," Schoelkopf said yesterday. "We don't want to be the bad guys again, like in 1993 when four of them were in the river and [federal officials] told us to leave them alone. Then the ice closed in on the river and four of them died."

Teri Frady, a spokeswoman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has jurisdiction over the animals, said they are fine where they are for now.

"We're looking at all contingencies, including having to move them," she said. "We're some time away from when we would worry about them."

The dolphins were sighted near the Route 35 bridge over the Navesink River between Red Bank and Middletown on Monday, Schoelkopf said. Before that, they spent several weeks in the Shrewsbury River, which flows into the Navesink near Sea Bright and Rumson.

Schoelkopf said the bottlenose dolphins seem to be healthy, aside from the fact that one of the babies appeared to be coughing over the July Fourth weekend, possibly from a parasite near his or her blow hole.

For now, the dolphins are feeding on fish in the rivers, including mossbunkers, a fish commonly sold as crab bait.

"But that's the problem - the food doesn't stay there all year," Schoelkopf said.

The dolphins are only about a mile from Sandy Hook Bay, which leads to the ocean. Researchers recently spotted dolphins in the bay, but have been unable to tell if they were part of the group that was in the rivers or whether they are different animals, Schoelkopf said.

Schoelkopf's group recommends dangling acoustic pingers off of boats and using the annoying noise to drive the dolphins to open water.