By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 1, 1998; Page A11

WELLFLEET, Mass., Jan. 31—Their smile-shaped snouts splattered with blood, five dead dolphins in the back of a flat-bed trailer led a dismal funeral cortege today through the winding roads of this Cape Cod town.

The Atlantic white-sided dolphins, having arrived and expired during the off-season in this vacation resort, traveled on a dank and drizzly winter's afternoon past the empty parking lots of the Liquor Locker, the Left Bank Gallery and the Cove Corner Bakery-Deli. They were followed by a dozen or so cars carrying somber volunteers who had helped to put the 500-pound, 7-foot mammals in a tarpaulin litter and muscled them onto the trailer.

More than 50 dolphins have died along the shores of Cape Cod Bay since Thursday in what rescue workers from the New England Aquarium said today is the deadliest stranding of marine mammals in the region in recent memory.

The stranding occurred -- as often is the case with white-sided dolphins, pilot whales and other toothed whales -- during an unusually high 11-foot moon tide and in the wake of an off-shore northeaster.

What was unheard of in this stranding, according to the aquarium's Susan Knapp, is that the dolphins beached themselves not in one location, but in scores of inlets and coves along a 40-mile arc of the Cape, from Wellfleet on the outer Cape to Yarmouth in the mid-Cape.

"This is very strange. They are all over the place. We don't know why it happened this way," said Knapp.

Strandings of whales and dolphins have been recorded around the world for centuries. Aristotle noted that they bumble ashore "rather frequently when the fancy takes them and without any apparent reason." Native Americans and pilgrims in New England recorded dozens of dolphin strandings.

Members of the aquarium's marine mammal stranding team, which has responded to more than 4,000 incidents since 1968, said today that while they are getting much better at responding to strandings, they still have very little understanding of why they occur.

The five dead dolphins on the trailer, some with gashes in their bellies from panicked writhing on jagged oyster beds, were being transported to a central Cape location for necropsies, the dolphin equivalent of autopsies.

By analyzing their blood and testing for infections and parasites, marine biologists will look for any common ailment or abnormality that might explain why these particular dolphins got stuck in the shallows.

The white-sided dolphin, which ranges from southern Greenland to Northern Virginia, is relatively plentiful and in no danger as a species. Even the highly socialized group in which they travel, known as a pod and typically numbering between several hundred and 1,000 dolphins, was not threatened by this stranding.

Connie Merigo, supervisor of the aquarium's mammal stranding team, offered an educated guess about what happens to dolphins after an extremely high tide. She said they can become disoriented when they are trapped inside a harbor in water that suddenly gets shallow.

"They have difficulty echo-locating with their sonar," she said. "It is difficult for them to get a picture of where they are or how to leave."

Lorial Russell, 22, an animal control officer here, came across one writhing, noisy and disoriented white-sided dolphin Friday morning. It had, she said, dug a hole for itself in the beach and was bleeding profusely, apparently from having been attacked by gulls. "The worst part of it is that it was crying," Russell said. "Every dolphin that we walked up to had tears rolling down its face."

Dolphins, in fact, do not weep tears of pain or horror when they are beached, according to Merigo, who specializes in emergency treatment of marine mammals.

"To say that they cry is to really put human emotions on the animal," she said. "What happens is that when they are stranded and exposed for an extended period to the open air, their eyes exude a gelatinous discharge."

It is possible, however, that stranded dolphins do cry out in pain and panic in their high-pitched "vocalizations," Merigo said. Marine biologists have recorded the sounds of stranded dolphins and are comparing those sounds to those of dolphins comfortably at sea.

Not all of the dolphins stranded along Cape Cod in the past few days have died after their initial encounter with land. On Friday, volunteers in motor boats managed to herd 16 out into the bay after they had been gently pushed out of shallow water. All of them were tagged before being coaxed out to deep water.

Three of these animals, however, later became confused, returned to the shallows around the Cape and have been found dead. One of them was on the trailer today.

When a dolphin is beached, it can die merely from its own weight.

"Their internal organs -- heart, liver, kidneys -- can be compressed on land. It causes pooling of blood, and they quickly go into shock," said Knapp, a spokesman for the marine mammal rescue team.

On Friday, a dolphin with tag No. 79 was caught in the mucky shallows of Chipman's Cove in Wellfleet. Its eyes had been pecked by gulls. A reporter from the Boston Herald and a Fox TV cameramen, one with a wet suit and one in waders, climbed into the water to keep the creature upright, so it could breathe.

But by the time a rescue team arrived from the aquarium, the dolphin was diagnosed as too far gone to be able to survive at sea. It was killed with two syringes of phenobarbital.

The bodies of the dolphins that are to be necropsied on Sunday will later be hauled out to an unoccupied island in the bay, far away from humans and their pets. There they will be laid out on the beach and left to the elements.