Read a wildlife emergency notice for scope and action

What should you report to NOAA?

To report a sick, injured, entangled, stranded or dead marine animal, find the NOAA Fisheries regional hotline for that species and area, call it, and keep people and pets at least 50 yards away. NOAA’s page opens on five conditions: sick, injured, entangled, stranded, or dead. It says reporting is the best way to make sure professional responders and scientists know about it and can take appropriate action. A dead animal counts exactly as much as an entangled one.

A wildlife emergency notice tells you what happened, where, and what category of animal is involved before it tells you what to do. Read the header first: it should name a species group (dolphins and whales, sea turtles, seals and sea lions, or fish) and a region. NOAA Fisheries organizes its stranding contacts by exactly this structure, splitting the country into Alaska, New England/Mid-Atlantic, Pacific Islands, Southeast, and West Coast, each with its own hotline and species key.

Check whether the notice is regional or statewide. Some states have a single stranding hotline covering all species; others split responsibility by animal type, with separate lines for sea turtles, sturgeon, sawfish, or manta rays. Florida, for example, routes both marine mammal and sea turtle reports through its Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission Wildlife Alert Hotline, while North Carolina splits stranding response across university and state aquarium contacts.

A notice that names one animal group but gives you a number for another won’t get a fast response, so match the species to the right line before calling. Look for a date stamp. The regional contact blocks on NOAA’s own reporting page carry four different last-updated stamps, from April 30, 2024 through May 15 and May 22, 2025 to December 17, 2025. More than eighteen months separates the oldest from the newest, on one page.

Confirm you’re looking at the current version of a notice before treating any phone number as reliable; a cached or forwarded copy can be out of date. Above the region selector, NOAA’s page gives one national instruction: if you see a sick, injured, stranded or dead marine mammal or sea turtle, immediately contact your local stranding network.

Find the reporting route

The reporting route depends on the species and the region named in the notice. NOAA Fisheries maintains a national reporting page where you select a region and get a matching set of phone numbers and, in some cases, a mobile app option.

For marine mammals, the Alaska region uses a statewide 24-hour hotline plus a separate Alaska SeaLife Center line for walruses, sea otters, and polar bears. The Southeast region runs a single marine mammal stranding hotline across states, alongside dedicated numbers for sea turtles, smalltooth sawfish, sturgeon, and giant manta ray sightings.

The West Coast region posts one regional stranding hotline, then breaks California into separate live-animal and dead-animal response contacts. Some regions also offer an app-based option. NOAA Fisheries’ reporting page notes a Dolphin and Whale 911 app for Apple devices, intended for reporting a stranded marine mammal directly from the scene.

Hawai’i’s Department of Land and Natural Resources separately runs a DLNRTip app for enforcement-related reports, which is a distinct channel from a stranding call. Suspected illegal activity toward a marine mammal is a separate category from a stranding or injury. NOAA’s Office of Law Enforcement hotline is the correct route for it, and it accepts emailed video or photos as part of a written report.

Two national contacts on that page, both for NOAA’s Office of Law Enforcement, are worth writing down: The NOAA Office of Law Enforcement hotline is (800) 853-1964 for possible illegal or suspicious activity, with written reports, video and photos accepted at RespectWildlife@noaa.gov. Everything else, stranding and injury included, runs through the regional block you select.

Match the notice’s category, stranding, injury, illegal take or non-emergency sighting, to the specific line before dialing. These are handled by different desks even inside the same agency.

Avoid turning observation into intervention

Reporting a stranded or injured animal means calling the listed hotline and staying away from the animal. NOAA Fisheries’ reporting page is specific: keep people and pets at least 50 yards, or 150 feet, away from the animal while you wait for a response.

Read that distance instruction with the current NOAA notice. Follow the agency’s instructions no matter how the animal looks. A notice routes your observation to a trained responder; it says nothing about bystanders handling, moving, or feeding the animal.

Photographs and written descriptions are useful to the responding network; physical contact stays outside the reporting process NOAA Fisheries’ contact pages describe. If a hotline or app is unavailable in the moment, documenting location, time, and species from a safe distance keeps the report usable once you do reach a responder.

Treat every stranding or injury contact as one-way communication into a professional network: the reporting public shares information, and trained responders act on it.

Share the useful part

The most transferable piece of any wildlife emergency notice is the exact contact and location detail, something a dispatcher can act on directly. When passing a notice along to others, or filing your own report, lead with the region, the species category, and the specific hotline number tied to that combination, since NOAA Fisheries organizes its entire contact system around that pairing, with no single national line covering every case.

If you’re forwarding a notice to someone else, include the “last updated” date shown on the relevant regional contact page. Stranding networks change contacts by region, and a number that was correct in one update cycle may not be listed in the next.

Avoid summarizing a notice in a way that drops the species key. A share that says only “stranded animal near the coast” strips out the detail a hotline dispatcher needs to route the call correctly.

Keep the species group, the region, and the distance instruction intact when relaying information, and point others directly to NOAA Fisheries’ regional reporting page so they can confirm the current number for themselves instead of trusting a secondhand phone number.