Save crucial funding for marine mammals

BREAKING NEWS: Federal grant support for marine mammal stranding response has been eliminated from the proposed fiscal year 2014 budget! The John H. Prescott Marine Mammal Rescue Assistance Grant Program provides critical funding for marine mammal rescue and research. Yesterday, this program was eliminated from 2014 budget submitted by President Obama and also on the NOAA budget.

Please urge your Senator and Representative to re-instate the Prescott Grant Program so that this vital rescue work can continue.

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We have prepared the email below for you. Please feel free to personalize this copy with your own polite message.

As a concerned member of your constituency, I am writing today to ask for your consideration and support on the very important issue of federal funding for marine mammal stranding response.  The proposed FY14 budgets submitted by President Obama and by NOAA eliminate the one federal funding source available for this important work.  I ask that you please preserve funding for NOAA’s Office of Protected Resources, and specifically the John H. Prescott Marine Mammal Rescue Assistance Grant Program.  Any cut to this modest, but very important program, would result in a significant reduction in the capacity of individual networks to respond to stranded marine mammals.

The national marine mammal stranding network is made up mainly of non-profit organizations that have very few staff and many dedicated volunteers.  These organizations help NOAA Fisheries to fulfill its legal mandate to respond to strandings under the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972.  Under Title IV of the Act, NOAA (under the Secretary of Commerce) is obliged to:

“collect and update, periodically, existing information on—(1) procedures and practices for—(A) rescuing and rehabilitating stranded marine mammals, including criteria used by stranding network participants, on a species-by-species basis, for determining at what point a marine mammal undergoing rescue and rehabilitation is returnable to the wild; and (B) collecting, preserving, labeling, and transporting marine mammal tissues for physical, chemical, and biological analyses; (2) appropriate scientific literature on marine mammal health, disease, and rehabilitation; (3) strandings, which the Secretary shall compile and analyze, by region, to monitor species, numbers, conditions, and causes of illnesses and deaths of stranded marine mammals; and (4) other life history and reference level data, including marine mammal tissue analyses, that would allow comparison of the causes of illness and deaths in stranded marine mammals with physical, chemical, and biological environmental parameters.”

Stranding networks provide the skilled and experienced personnel necessary to fulfill this legal mandate, which NOAA cannot do internally.  These organizations do their best to garner public donations and foundation grants to cover some of the costs of response to live and dead marine mammals, with only this one dedicated grant program providing a small portion of federal support for the work.  Unlike other federally mandated work which receives federal funding from a variety of agencies and sources, the Prescott Grant Program is the only federal funding dedicated to stranding response.  It is unrealistic to assume that these dedicated organizations can continue to fulfill an ever growing demand for data , without continued federal support.

The work done by stranding networks goes beyond the animal welfare provided through response to live stranded animals and the added human safety value of having trained responders.  Every animal, live and dead, is examined and key data and samples are collected.  These data are used by NOAA in developing sound, science-based policies to protect not only marine mammals, but also ocean ecosystems and human health.  Stranded marine mammals provide essential data in identifying emerging diseases and effects of biotoxins which can threaten commercially valuable fish and shellfish species, as well as human health.

The Prescott Grant Program also serves to generate additional public funding for this work.  All grant recipients must provide matching funds totaling one third of the federal funds requested.  Over the life of the grant program more than $36M in federal funding has leveraged over $12M in public support for this important, federally mandated work.  I urge you to demand the preservation of funding for the John H. Prescott Marine Mammal Rescue Assistance Grant Program. Thank you for your consideration.

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