THE rare Rissos Dolphin (grampus griseus) found by fishermen in San Fabian on Monday morning died at 5:56 a.m. last Tuesday and buried a few hours later at the country’s lone fish cemetery for threatened, endangered and near extinct fishes inside the 24-hectare National Fisheries Technology Development Center here.

Dr. Westly Rosario, interim director of the National Fisheries Technology Research Development Institute and concurrent NIFTDC officer-in-charge, said the dolphin may have died due to infection caused by an unhealed bullet would near its mouth, and the possible trauma it suffered when it was caught by fishermen.

He said the dolphin died a few hours after marine biologists of the Ocean Adventure in Subic called up to offer their advice on how to take care of the wounded dolphin, including how to manage its gunshot wound.

Rosario said he placed two technicians to monitor the condition of the dolphin all night, to make sure that the advice given by Ocean Adventure marine biologists is followed to the letter.

“We did our best to save the dolphin. Unfortunately, it died,” said Rosario.

He said they noted that it had a gunshot wound hear the mouth and did not know exactly the trauma that it underwent when fishermen of San Fabian brought it to shore, then put into the back of a truck that transported it to the center (INFTDC),” Rosario said.

The dolphin weighed more than a ton, at least six feet and three inches in length and six feet and three inches in girth (body circumference), with an apparently bulging stomach.
It died while it was inside a tank filled with water where it was under round-the-clock monitoring by scientists and technicians of NIFTDC.

Before it was buried, about 20 people lifted it from the tank that was already drained with water, using a grill net. It took these people less than an hour more to load the dead mammal to an elf truck that brought it to the fish cemetery where a newly drug grave was waiting.

Rosario said the Rissos dolphin was the 14th rare fish belonging to the threatened, endangered and in near extinct species buried there since 1999.

In fact, it was the 11th dolphin that was buried at the site since the fish cemetery was established.

The only fish cemetery in the Philippines if not in the world today, this is an 80-square meter circular lot in the northern part of the NIFTDC, styled like a public cemetery for humans.