Dead Dolphin Found Shot on Louisiana’s West Mae’s Beach With Bullets in Brain, Spine and Heart as NOAA Offers $20,000 Reward

Whoever put bullets through a young dolphin off the Louisiana coast has not been caught. The carcass washed up on West Mae’s Beach in Cameron Parish on March 13, 2024. A necropsy at the Audubon Nature Institute in New Orleans found rounds lodged in the brain, the spinal cord, and the heart. Audubon Aquarium Rescue, a NOAA stranding partner, said the animal died of that trauma at or near the moment it was shot.

NOAA’s Office of Law Enforcement is still offering up to $20,000 for information that leads to a criminal conviction or a civil penalty. The reward has been on the books since April 2024. No arrest has been announced. Tips can go to the NOAA Enforcement Hotline at 800-853-1964. Anonymous calls are accepted, but a name and a contact are required to collect the money.

Killing a wild dolphin is not a local nuisance case. The Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 makes it a federal crime to harass, harm, feed, or kill these animals. Penalties run as high as $100,000 and a year in jail per offense. NOAA still posts the same instruction it posted the week the body was found: if you see a stranded or injured marine mammal, call the Southeast Marine Mammal Stranding Hotline and leave it to trained responders.

One Animal, A Whole Bay

Dr. Moby Solangi, president of the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies, has said for years that bottlenose dolphins live in tight family groups and that killing one animal can scramble a whole social unit. West Mae’s Beach sits near Barataria Bay, Louisiana’s largest estuary and a year-round home for a bottlenose population scientists already treat as stressed. After the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill, that bay’s dolphins suffered reproductive failure and chronic illness tied to oil. Later surveys put the remaining Barataria animals at roughly 2,000.

That is the context a shooter walked into: a population that had already been poisoned by industry, then finished off with a rifle. The AEGIS Alliance has tracked the same pattern of treating marine life as target practice or a sideshow, from the countries that finally banned killer-whale and dolphin breeding to the record herds of California sea lions that took over San Francisco’s Pier 39.

The case is still open. NOAA has not named a suspect. The $20,000 is still on the table. For more on how governments treat water, wildlife, and the people who live next to both, see The AEGIS Alliance’s Environment coverage and the report on Nestlé pulling water from Canadian towns on expired permits.