Reporting live and dead Marine Mammal and Sea Turtle Strandngs

Nature Talk
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For everyone that may not know this, most states and countries with a coastline have organizations that respond to live and dead stranded marine mammals and sea turtles. I’ve noticed quite a few observations posted on this website for my state that don’t state they were reported to the stranding network. There are hotline numbers that may be state or region-specific listed on the internet that you can call to report these observations listed in this link (https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/report)

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What a great link!

In Mexico, protection for flora and fauna is a federal responsibility which falls to PROFEPA (La Procuraduria Federal de Proteccion al Ambiente).

If someone knows of an animal in need of assistance, it is easily reported by phone to 800-PROFEPA. They work in coordination with other federal agencies and local/state authorities.

PD: Welcome to the forums. :slightly_smiling_face:

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looks like NOAA created an app to report marine mammals in trouble. so there must be some underlying inftrastructure that could receive these kinds of electronic reports on the NOAA end and then distribute that infromation to whoever needs to know.

i bet if someone was really interested in a doing a small coding project, they could set up something that would monitor iNaturalist observations as they come in, maybe run them through some sort of very basic AI to look for signs of death or distress, and then, as appropriate, send these through to NOAA, while maybe then noting that in a comment in iNaturalist. (the comment might technically run afoul of iNat’s prohibition of machine generated content, but i don’t think anyone would look askance at that kind of use.)

then that code / setup could be given to NOAA, and maybe they could take it over internally. (or more likely, they would probably have talked to NOAA in advance to figure out the underlying architecture of the electronic reporting, and maybe that could have spurred an effort within NOAA to do this on their own or provide resources to facilitate an outside developer to do the coding work but ultimately get it in NOAA hands.)