I now know that when blending a smoothie for a dolphin, you need to watch out for squid tentacles.

"I’ve actually caught a blender on fire," says Denise Jackson, longtime member of the Florida Keys Marine Mammal Rescue Team, over the blare of a blender. "I was making squid shakes and the little tentacles got wrapped around the blades and jammed them up. All of the sudden, I had flames shooting out of the blender."

My curiosity about what kind of person volunteers for the Florida Keys rescue team brings me in the early morning March darkness to the Mote Marine Laboratory, an independent, nonprofit marine research organization on Summerland Key (Mile Marker 24.2), where I’m getting schooled in the vagaries of making and serving a fish-Pedialyte-antibiotic shake that may mean life or death for four rehabbing dolphins.

Jackson, part owner of the charter boat Stars & Stripes in Key West, stands at the sink of a borrowed motor home, preparing this gruel for four dolphins retrieved from a mass stranding that received worldwide new coverage. Jackson and other "diehard" volunteers are working a midnight to 8 a.m. shift until the dolphin-rehab process is complete. "Working with marine mammals can definitely bring out the best in people," she says.

Round-the-clock feedings require two to three people holding the mammals, a person to pass the tube into the stomach, a person holding the funnel that feeds the tube, a person pouring the liquid into the funnel. Jackson regularly works the tube — her hands bear dolphin teeth marks in several places.

Outside, wrapped securely in an old blanket against the churlish weather, Patty, another volunteer, keeps a vigil over two females, identified as #352 and #372, who circle hypnotically in a four-foot deep tank. "Get in, sit down, shut up, and hold on," says a sign on the rescue team’s trailer parked nearby.

Jackson measures frozen fish into a bowl perched on a scale. The pungent concoction she prepares is blended liberally until smooth enough to pass through a feeding tube the width of a garden hose.

After she finishes each batch, she pours the concoction into bottles numbered for each dolphin. The preparation process takes about an hour.

Picking up stranded dolphins

Volunteer Fred Morris, a local insurance adjuster, sticks his head into the motor home. "Suit up," Jackson tells him. Morris frequently volunteers in rescue efforts but he is subbing for a friend on the midnight shift.

"Working with these dolphins is really special, and I enjoy the solitude of being here overnight," Morris says. "I do some star gazing, too. It’s an amazing show."

It is almost straight up 8 as we approach the tanks, 20 to 24 feet in diameter, on this cloudy, breezy day. Team rescue coordinator Celeste Weimer, a marine biologist, arrives to help with the feeding. We squeeze into wet suits hanging on a rack nearby. Jackson, Morris, and I enter the first tank, the two females inside circling in the 75-degree water.

Jackson corrals the first dolphin, #352, and Morris and I approach from the rear, securing #352 by the front of each dorsal fin, bracing our inside legs to her underbelly. Her touch is surprisingly dry, soft, rubbery, and fragile. The creature’s strength is evident — she could easily toss us aside — but has become familiar with the process and is fairly relaxed.

Weimer and another volunteer wait on the platform with stomach tube, funnel, and liquid ready. "Okay, girl, here we go, easy," Jackson purrs gently to the dolphin as she slides the lightly lubricated tube into her mouth until it reaches a pre-measured mark indicating the end is in the dolphin’s stomach. Weimer starts pouring the liquid into the funnel, and gravity works its magic. Occasionally, the dolphin will clamp down on the hose and Jackson will have to gently talk her into loosening her grip.

While we are doing the feeding, #372 keeps circling, randomly stopping to butt Morris or me from behind and show us her teeth, just to let us know she is watching out for her tank partner.

We repeat the process three more times. In a second tank, the male of the group (#327), which weighs 393 pounds, is a bit more problematic, because of his strength. A week ago, he was listless and rolling onto his back. Responding to rehab, today he is active, his eyes open and alert. As he eats, he studies me out of his right eye. It’s a look of spooky cognizance.

By now, the next shift of volunteers is arriving. Some are regulars; others are visitors drawn by news reports of the strandings. They receive instructions and are assigned to one of the wooden monitoring platforms.

One forty-something couple, Patrick and Mary Flynn, is on a week’s vacation from New York. They have been kayaking and "doing the basic tourist thing." They originally planned to swim with dolphins at one of the local attractions, but they decided after reading a story in the Sunday paper that helping out would be much better.

"We like to do volunteer work, and the article said they needed people," Mary says.

Rescue groups depend on attracting such volunteers to augment their trained crews during the lengthy rehab process.

What makes Key West-based Mammal Rescue a particularly unique organization is that it operates independently, responding to marine mammal stranding from Key West along this 800-island chain to Mile Marker 70 under the auspices of the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 section 409(3).

"In 1988, I got involved with my first dolphin stranding, and I’ve been doing it ever since," Jackson says. "I don’t think this could be done anywhere else. We exist without a built-in institute to support us, and virtually no federal funds. Yet we can mobilize volunteers 24 hours a day."

Such a mobilization occurred March 2, when Becky Arnold, director of the Florida Keys Marine Mammal Rescue Team, received a call about a mass dolphin stranding near Marathon. About sixty rough-toothed dolphins (Steno bredanensis) had inexplicably emerged from the oceans depths to wedge themselves on oceanside mud flats exposed by low tide. Others were trapped in the shallows of neighborhood canals.

Installing a tracking devise

Arnold, one of hundreds of trained rescue personnel who can be found from Miami to Key West, knew that time is critical, that any hope of saving stranded mammals relies on the speed with which volunteer networks could provide aid.

Arnold’s first call went to team coordinator Weimer, who lives near Marathon but was at her Conch Baby Farm job in Key West. Weimer feverishly worked her cell phone as she zipped up Highway 1 toward the stranding site.

About the same time, a reporter friend phoned Jackson, and she immediately headed toward Marathon.

Other rescue organizations in Key Largo and Miami responded in kind.

While such a widespread beaching is rare, ailing dolphins, whales, and manatees occasionally enter local shallows, lost or separated from their pods, or suffering from health problems. When they do, a safety net of professionals and volunteers assess their needs and tries to help them return to their natural haunts.

"Dolphins are mammals and air breathers," explains Dr. Doug Mader, a native veterinarian who supervises local rescue efforts. While in the water, they never feel the force of gravity, he notes, and because their rib cages are semi-flexible they endure a tremendous amount of pressure on their internal organs when stranded on their bellies. Since their dorsal fin, which acts as a sort of mammal radiator, is out of the water, they cannot effectively remove heat from their bodies. An inordinate amount of stress compounds these problems.

"They get up on land, and start to struggle and injure themselves externally and internally, which generally shows up later in the process," Mader says. "Lactic acid builds up in their muscles when they struggle on land, and that can cause permanent damage. In these situations, what you want to do is get them into water as soon as you can."

Once on the scene, rescue teams began melding with neighbor and drive-by volunteers, fanning out on the unseasonably cool evening to locate and identify the mammals, which were stranded about a quarter mile off shore, protruding out of the water like old pier pilings.

"We could see them flailing," Weimer recalls. "Florida Fish and Wildlife personnel were in boats trying to limit traffic through the area. They provided us with access to the flats."

The group quickly formed a triage network, trying to keep the dolphins upright so the trapped dolphins could breath. "We were running back and forth through about six inches of muck for about a half hour before we got the second wave of volunteers," Weimer says.

Once Dr. Mader arrived, he quickly realized he was in the middle of the worst stranding he had encountered since returning to the Keys to practice eight years ago. Mader and Weimer began numbering the dolphins with pink oxide spray to get a count and start tracking them.

Releasing a dolphin into the Atlantic

Forty-eight were stranded on the flats, and another eighteen were swimming blindly through the canals that track through the area. Jackson took charge of the canals, trying to prevent the dolphins from entering the shallows.

Darkness fell quickly to the mangrove-strewn landscape. Personnel from the Coast Guard, Monroe County Sheriff’s Department and the City of Marathon Fire Rescue cordoned off traffic in the area and supervised care of the volunteers. Locals and tourists, tipped by local radio reports, started turning out in droves.

Volunteer coordinators devised a plan. "We couldn’t just push them into the water, because they would just come back and get stranded," Weimer explains. The rough-toothed dolphin usually dwells in deep waters, avoiding human contact. They are dramatically loyal to their pod, which in this instance led them to blindly follow each other onto the shallows.

Each mammal had at least one person assigned to it. Since the rescue team didn’t have the resources to boat all the animals into deeper water, they decided to wait for the tide to come in before moving them.

"The controlled chaos was very eerie," Weimer recalls. "We were standing out there in the middle of the night in the quiet, and all you could see were the glowing dots from the glow-sticks we gave to the volunteers and attached to the dolphins. The dolphins would whistle and make clicking sounds back and forth."

The rescue team constructed a floating sea pen. "As soon as we could, we needed to identify what animals we would take for rehab, and which were in such bad shape they had to be euthanized," Weimer says.

As the tide came in, the water got waste deep, adding another element to the mix. "There are a lot of sharks around here, and they can sense distressed animals," Weimer explains. "We wanted to save the dolphins but we didn’t want to lose anybody doing it. For safety reasons, the Coast Guard put out an order saying everybody had to be out of the water by 2 a.m. So we walked the majority of the dolphins closer to shore and into the pen."

There, Mader and the rescue teams performed exams. By Friday morning, a group of vets looked at the results of blood work on the dolphins, identifying survivor candidates. Fifteen perceived as untreatable were euthanized that afternoon.

Three rescue organizations, Mammal Rescue, the Mammal Conservatory in Key Largo, and Marine Animal Rescue Society in Miami, began making plans to transport the surviving dolphins to different sites. MARS tooks two dolphins back to Miami. MMC loaded 25 into a borrowed eighteen-wheeler lined with foam and moved them to its base in Key Largo. Mammal Rescue moved four in a foam-padded U-Haul. Volunteers, first loaded the dolphins onto stretchers, and then into the vehicles, and then constantly doused the dolphins with water to keep their skin hydrated.

Once at the Mote laboratory, volunteers started 24-hour surveillance and treatment operations, tracking the animals’ breathing patterns and drawing blood for analysis. The dolphins began an every-four-hour feeding schedule with the tube-fed smoothies. Since dolphins get 100 percent of their fluids from what they eat — they have no ability to absorb fresh water from salt water — the first efforts concentrated on rehydration — mostly Pedialyte and medication. The trauma of the stranding had immediate effects, as one of the females miscarried right away.

A massive event such as this stranding is not the norm; the organization usually deals with more isolated instances involving fewer mammals. It prepares for the worst, however, conducting monthly training sessions for its volunteer network — "each month being a different topic — anatomy lessons, stretcher transport protocol lessons, etc.," Jackson says. "We go over different species and how each should be treated."

Releasing a dolphin into the Atlantic

The group raises funds needed for antibiotics, office supplies, specific equipment, etc., through fundraisers and local merchant contributions. "Denise is the master of getting things," coordinator Weimer says. "I marvel at how she does it. We also have a lot of volunteers who brainstorm about raising money to support the rehab process."

Jackson chuckles when resources are brought up. "We got some federal funds a few years ago to buy some big-ticket items like the tank and filter," she says. "Otherwise, we beg, borrow, and steal in the finest tradition."

Despite the team’s Herculean efforts, dolphin #352 dies from trauma-related injuries March 12. Although the male, #327, prospers and seems to be on the road to recovery he takes ill at 10:30 p.m. on March 24 and succumbs 2:30 the next morning. An autopsy finds he died of pancreatis (there is no way of determining how he contracted it, the veterinarian Mader says). And No. 356? Sadly, she succumbs on April 11.

Eleven of the rescued dolphins were nursed back to health (seven of them as a group in May about 14 nautical miles off the Florida Keys near Key Largo) and a baby calf who could not be released back into the ocean was sent to Gulf World in Panama City.

The last two in captivity, one of which was #372, were released September 12 after an extended rehab at MMC in Key Largo. At one point Weimer was warned that 372’s tail would never be straight again, that there was too much scar tissue and she would never be releasable.

"I was bound and determined to prove them wrong, and sure enough that girl is straight as a board and swimming free once again," Celeste says. She was fully healed and doing aerials before we released her. She was a real rock star."

Weimer calls the moment that 372 hit the open ocean "one of the best moments of my life."

"I've worked so closely with her these last six months, and have been by her side through so many obstacles (miscarriage, physical therapy for her tail curve, companions dying, moving to new homes, etc). I miss her so much, but couldn't be happier right now. I was able to have a front row seat for her release. I was just so excited to see her slide off that board and hit the deep blue once again. She and 134 (the other dolphin released that day) took off side-by-side."

Although the overall dolphin loss is devastating to the volunteer groups, any survivors are incredibly fortunate, and a joy.

Freed dolphin takes off

"These animals already died once," Mader says. "Any that we can save, basically we are giving them a second chance."

Freelance writer John H. Ostdick, a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Awards medal winner, lives in Dallas. Most recently, three of his stories — including a naturaltraveler.com piece on Acapulco — won awards in the 2005 Society of American Travel Writers Central States Writing Competition.