Life guard
By Sandy Coleman
July 29, 2002. 6:30 a.m.
Katie Touhey's phone rang.
Six pilot whales had beached themselves in Dennis, Mass. Touhey, senior scientist and executive director of the Cape Cod Stranding Network, raced to the office to load rescue gear. Another call. Ten pilot whales were on the beach. Another call, 30. Then, nearly 60.
Touhey, her staff, hundreds of her volunteers, onlookers and vacationers worked to save the whales. She and her team tried to coax the two-ton creatures back into the water. The crowd formed a water bucket brigade to cool them on one of the hottest days of the season. They managed to get some back only to have 40 of them re-strand the following day.
"Not a single animal survived," Touhey '93 said recently as she stared down at her conference table and quietly relived it. "That was probably the most traumatic and life-changing experience I've ever had."
She came to an important realization that day: She won't always win the battle to save lives, but she will never be defeated as long as she keeps trying and continues her scientific research to solve the riddle of why marine mammals beach themselves.
"I had a reporter that night say to me: 'How do you deal with such a failure?' And [that question] was what helped me change my perspective on what success is. I looked at the reporter and I said, 'Well, we didn't fail.' As far as I know nobody named me God. We don't control the natural environment and we can't control these animals. Nobody got hurt. We used everything in our means to try to release them. It didn't work. But, what's failure? We still learned a lot and we did everything we could. Failure would have been not trying."
Responding to a great need
The nonprofit Cape Cod Stranding Network, which operates on about $400,000 annually in gifts and grants, responds to 500 to 700 calls a year to help stranded marine mammals -- mostly Atlantic white-sided and common dolphins, seals and pilot whales. Of those, 200 to 220 need intervention and medical care. Winter is the busiest season, and New England is one of the three hot spots worldwide for mass strandings (from two to 100 or more animals). Cape Cod averages five to six mass strandings per year. However, the trend is on the upswing. In 2006, there were 14 mass strandings in the region.
The network covers about 700 miles of coastline. Touhey, a Wheaton Scholar who thought she wanted to be an environmental writer until her first science class here changed her mind, studied environmental science at Wheaton and got a master's of environmental management from Duke University. She began as the stranding network coordinator in 1998 and shortly after became senior scientist and executive director.
As director, she does a lot of everything -- responds to strandings, collects samples and data, examines bodies for evidence of human interaction, conducts necropsies, writes grants for funding and even cleans up the lunchroom when it is her turn.
Since her start, the organization has grown from a paid staff of two to its current four full-time workers and one part-timer. Currently, her team of volunteers consists of 350 dedicated individuals spread out in the region, one emergency phone call away.
The Cape Cod Stranding Network recently has merged with the Yarmouth Port-based International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), one of the nation's top environmental organizations. The partnership combines the network's staff and volunteers with the International Fund for Animal Welfare's worldwide resources, which lifts the network's administrative burden, provides access to international scientific resources, and allows Touhey and her team to better focus on stranding response, research and public education. In the fall, the network moved its offices from inside of the National Marine Life Center in Buzzards Bay to Yarmouth Port.
"This is a huge leap forward for us and for the animals," said Touhey. And it's a long way to come from the hand-me-down truck and handful of rescue stretchers of the network's start.
A.J. Cady, IFAW's director of animals in crisis and distress, said the benefits are mutual. Given his organization's global focus, Cady said he hopes to use the "world-class stranding team here on Cape Cod as a model for other hot spots around the world."
Touhey considers the merger the ultimate validation of the network. Those who know her are not surprised.
"Katie has become a leader in the field of stranding response and in the treatment of live animal stranding events," said William McLellan, the North Carolina state stranding coordinator and large whale mortality team leader for the stranding program at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He worked with her on marine mammal strandings in the mid-'90s when she was finishing her master's at Duke and volunteering with a stranding network.
"She has shown incredible poise dealing with both the ethical and humane treatment of stranded animals and the courteous and professional treatment of people who are attracted to live stranding events," he said. "Live stranding events are, by definition, stressful on the animals, and the humans who are participating. Katie and the Cape Cod Stranding Network have developed standard operating procedures that are based on good science and are non-negotiable in the field. The procedures that have been developed on the Cape have organized literally hundreds of individuals to work as a team and produce the best possible results for stranded animals."
McLellan first encountered Touhey when she was called to a stranding event involving a live finback whale that had become mired in mud nearly three miles inside of Oregon Inlet in North Carolina. "It was subfreezing weather the whole time out there...Over the course of the three days we spent nearly 22 hours a day awake and dealing with this particularly challenging event. I knew Katie was a keeper."
Touhey and her network's involvement in mass stranding prevention is also significant and interesting, said Sue Barco, stranding response coordinator for the Virginia Aquarium, who also has known Touhey since the 1990s.
"The collaborative scientific atmosphere that Katie has fostered at the network with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, New England Aquarium and others is one of the strong points of their work," said Barco. "While a small organization like the network may not have the resources to conduct independent research, Katie recognizes the value of the data and samples her organization collects, and finds research partners to collaborate with."
The network has been working with Woods Hole researchers studying diseases that affect marine life.
"Marine mammals, especially dolphins, are pretty good sentinels, kind of like the canary in the coal mine. They tell us what is going on in the environment around them," said Touhey.
"Marine mammal science is a young science. Most of what we know about marine mammals comes from stranded animals because they are so hard to study in the wild. There are select areas, like in Florida, where there are in-depth, long-term studies of wild populations. But generally you go on a whale watch and you see some animals and you see them for a very small percentage of time and then they are gone...So, there are a lot of questions to be answered, especially on the medical side."
She and her staff have also been working with the Smithsonian Institution collecting data from live and dead stranded marine mammals and reviewing events over the past 20 to 30 years regionally to see whether there is a pattern to the strandings. Locally, the network educates the public through lectures and visits to public schools. High school students are invited to do necropsies of dolphins and seals.
It's all about the "why."
"We always get asked: 'Why do they strand?'" said Touhey. "When it's a single animal, a dolphin or a whale or a seal, the majority of the time we can figure out why that animal is there. It's sick, it's injured, it's very old, it's very young and separated from its mother. When we have a mass stranding, that's the million-dollar question. Certainly we have some answers. Part of it is that species that mass strand themselves are very, very social animals. In ninety nine percent of the cases around the globe the root of the stranding is the social structure. They stick together, which is very advantageous to them in the wild. This social bond is what makes them strand together, but many factors can contribute to why they actually strand: weather, bathymetry, tidal fluctations."
Following a passion
Stranding networks were mandated by Congress under the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972. Under the National Marine Fisheries Service, the regional networks provide long-term management and research programs to conserve and protect the animals.
Touhey's path to the Cape Cod Stranding Network began with her volunteering to help with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's annual dolphin count in North Carolina in 1994, which eventually led to a paying job coordinating stranding responses.
But long before that her interest in the environment was ignited by the summers the Milford, Mass., native spent in Mattapoisett, Mass., and by her journey through Wheaton.
Her parents, a retired school teacher mom and former package store owner dad, had a summer home in the small coastal town. She spent her time in programs at the Lloyd Center for Environmental Studies in nearby Dartmouth, Mass. She was hooked.
"My brain is rather analytical so the challenge of how things work together, how the different elements of an ecosystem come together was appealing. For me, it's really the marine environment that does it. I like the whole scientific and environmental field," she said.
"When I was in high school I didn't do much in the sciences. I was actually discouraged from doing that by one of the college placement officers. I struggled with chemistry my first year in high school and I think he thought I couldn't handle it. The funny thing was I really wanted to take AP biology as a senior. He didn't want me to do it so I didn't do it.
"When I got to Wheaton the next year I took the introductory bio class, and I did really well. That was my life lesson: Don't let other people put limitations on you. Once I got to Wheaton I realized, 'Wait a minute, I can do this. I can do what I want to do.'"
After Wheaton, with the encouragement of her biology professor Scott Shumway (who remembers her as the student who got top exam scores), Touhey enrolled in Duke to pursue coastal zone management. She figured she would come back to Massachusetts and save the coastline from being poorly developed or overly developed and protect the natural resources.
She worked for the Navy briefly in a civilian job as a natural resources specialist. The job didn't fit her so she quit, "which almost gave my dad a heart attack. But one thing I do pretty well is trust my instincts, trust my gut."
Making a difference
"I've always had a sense-and I don't think I realized it until recently-that in order to be really happy I need to feel like I'm making a difference."
She smiles a lot these days: The network's mass stranding prevention program has been successful for several species. It involves responding early when animals are near the shore and herding them back out into deeper water, which was not done before the stranding network started. And the successful release rate for mass stranded cetaceans has increased -- from 40 percent in 2006 to 50 percent in 2007.
Touhey had not planned on a career saving marine mammals. Who would plan on a job that required years of living on standby, on-call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, missing Mother's Day dinners, having most holidays interrupted, often missing the endings of movies?
"But it's feeling like what I do everyday makes some kind of difference. At times, it's hard. You sit back and say, 'Look, there are all these people starving in the world -- tsunamis and hurricanes -- I should be helping people.' But I have a good friend who said that everybody has their calling and their place. Go with it. There is value in what you do."
Last year, The Hotchkiss School in Connecticut, where she went to boarding school, gave Touhey the Hotchkiss Alumni Community Service Award, presented to those who have demonstrated through their volunteer and/or vocational endeavors an exemplary sense of caring, initiative and ingenuity. She's proud of it.
"When I accepted my award, I said: 'Expect greatness from yourself and from the people around you. If you don't expect it, you won't achieve it.'"
