Two North Carolina organizations have received federal grant money to support their efforts to respond to stranded marine mammals — like dolphins.
At the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, the funds will be used for response to marine mammal strandings in southern North Carolina -- with an emphasis on the bottlenose dolphin -- as well as how human interaction impacts their health. The grant totaled just under $100,000.
A second nearly $100,000 grant will allow the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality to study strandings and unusual mortality events among marine mammals.
NOAA’s John H. Prescott Marine Mammal Rescue Assistance grant program supports the conservation and recovery of protected marine specie by helping to improve stranding and entanglement response and investigations into marine mammal health.
This year more than $3.7 million dollars in grants was awarded, nearly $1 million in the Greater Atlantic Region.
