Updated, 5:48 p.m. | A female common dolphin, six feet long and nearly 140 pounds, bobbed ashore at Far Rockaway, Queens, on Friday morning and flopped onto the beach.
For several hours, as police officers poured water on her and rescuers raced west from a marine-mammal stranding center 65 miles away, the dolphin clung to life. She was loaded onto a truck and taken to the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation on Long Island.
But as the rescuers prepared to transfer her from a stretcher into a tank, the dolphin died, said Robert DiGiovanni Jr., the Riverhead Foundation's executive director and senior biologist.
The dolphin was first spotted on the sand around 9:30 a.m., at the end of Beach 19th Street, the police said.
Mr. DiGiovanni said the dolphin, a subadult, had probably been sick for some time. She was underweight and had barnacles growing on her tail fin, or fluke, "which indicates an animal that wasn't moving very fast."
As dolphins are mammals and breathe air, they can survive for some time out of the water. This dolphin, though, "wasn't fighting that much, which is always a concern for us," Mr. DiGiovanni said.
It was unclear what caused the dolphin to move ashore, Mr. DiGiovanni said.
"Strandings occur for a variety of different reasons," he said. "Sometimes they have a specific cause, a stressor in the environment."
In this case, Mr. DiGiovanni said, "Maybe she was in an area and just didn't want to swim anymore."
The cause of the death, around 3:15 p.m., awaits a necropsy.
The Riverhead Foundation, based in Riverhead, handles about 50 reports of beached marine mammals a year, Mr. DiGiovanni said. Most of the animals are dead by the time they are reached.
"It's uncommon for us to get a live animal, so whenever we do get that we go to great lengths to try to nurse them back to health," he said. "Unfortunately, often when we get them back to the facility and they're too compromised."
Randy Leonard and Wendy Ruderman contributed reporting.
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