Rescuers working on the front lines of massive marine mammal die-offs on both U.S. coasts have been dealt a hard blow during an already difficult year. On Tuesday, dozens of rescue centers learned they wouldn’t be getting any federal financial help for the next year.

“We are the boots on the ground, we are the people that are responding to the strandings,” said Mark Swingle, director of research and conservation at the Virginia Aquarium and Marine Science Center, one of the organizations that didn't get funding. Swingle's group is in the midst of responding to one of the worst dolphin die-offs in memory: More than 200 animals have died this summer in Virginia alone. “We’re up to our eyeballs trying to make ends meet,” he said.

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In recent years, roughly $4 million in funds has been available to members of the national marine mammal stranding network. These are the people like Swingle who respond when dead whales wash up on beaches, when hundreds of dolphins and manatees die along the East Coast, and when thousands of starving sea lion pups strand themselves on California beaches.

This year, after being forced by Congress to slash its $5.1 billion budget by about 7 percent, NOAA cut funding for the John H. Prescott Marine Mammal Rescue Assistance Grant Program that provided the money. The agency initially proposed eliminating funding for the Prescott program entirely. The good news is that it managed to find $1 million, now distributed among 12 stranding network partners. (About 40 rescue centers typically receive grants.)

“The fact that we were able to find that money was definitely something that we were happy about,” said Nicole LeBoeuf, chief of the Marine Mammal and Sea Turtle division in NOAA’s Office of Protected Resources. She adds that NOAA has found some emergency funds on top of that figure to help rescue centers keep going. "We're trying to do the best we can to support the network partners until we can get ourselves to a place where we can restore funding levels," she said. "We value the stranding network partners, and particularly when we have these large-scale, labor-intensive events."

The timing of the funding cuts is especially unfortunate, given how overwhelmed rescue centers on both coasts have been. Since January 1, multitudes of sea lions, manatees, and dolphins have littered the country's shores, prompting NOAA to declare four Unusual Mortality Events, a signal that these mass die-offs require immediate attention.

"These are likely telling us, at least in some situations, that there are things out there we need to be concerned about," said Daryl Boness, chair of the Marine Mammal Commission, an agency tasked with assessing the effectiveness of the country's marine mammal programs. "This is part of why the [Prescott] program is so important to us. These events are a little bit like canaries in coal mines. The Commission fully supports that program and would love to see it funded again."

Some rescue centers rely almost entirely on Prescott support.

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“We’re basically going from our sole source of support to now standing there wondering how we’re going to run this program,” said Kristi West, who founded the stranding response program at Hawaii Pacific University. She’s responsible for a huge geographic area that includes Hawaii, American Samoa, and Guam. “We’re very, very concerned about what the impact is going to be,” she said.

Most immediately, some rescue centers will have to scramble to cover basic costs – like food and medicine for sick animals, gas money, and salaries – with fundraising efforts eating up time normally spent helping animals or collecting data and trying to figure out what’s caused an animal to strand. Data collected by these rescue centers and associated research institutions are integral for studies of marine mammals and their environment, especially with rare animals or in troubled ecosystems.

Network partners are already lamenting the possible loss of important research data. “We go out and recover these animals, and we try to learn as much as we can from them,” West said. In Hawaii, she’s had the opportunity to study species that don’t generally visit the continental U.S., and has found region-specific strains of diseases, like the morbillivirus that’s currently devastating bottlenose dolphins on the East Coast.

“It’s sad to miss that opportunity to fully investigate each animal that comes in,” she said.

Rehabilitation operations will suffer, too. In Alaska, the only facility certified for animal rehab is the Alaska SeaLife Center, in Seward. The center gets rehab animals from all over the state.

“Prescott covers the majority of our expenses for our core busy season, which is kind of the extended summer,” said Carrie Goertz, a veterinarian at the facility. This means that they’re facing a reduction in their ability to respond to and rehabilitate animals, many of whom – like endangered beluga whales, bearded seals and walrus – don’t come farther south. These animals, like those in Hawaii, are a source of valuable data for scientists and conservation efforts.

The most fundamental worry, though, is that another mass mortality event will strike. In a year that’s already seen multiple Unusual Mortality Events, that’s not an unlikely possibility – and a network that’s got weak spots won’t be able to respond as effectively.

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“If one piece goes away, it’s way more work for you, and you’re probably not going to do it as well,” said Megan Stolen, at Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute. Stolen has been working with the dolphins dying in Florida’s Indian River Lagoon; her Prescott Grant was funded, but she worries that if the East Coast die-off spreads farther south, she’ll be facing bodies piling up on multiple fronts without enough help because other rescue centers in the area have lost their funding.

Many rescue centers already lean heavily on volunteers – like The Marine Mammal Center, in Sausalito, Calif., where a corps of about 1,000 volunteers helps with daily operations. West’s program in Hawaii combines teaching with stranding response, and attracts about 100 students participants per year. The Alaska SeaLife Center pulls from a small pool of volunteers in remote Seward, a town with a population of about 3,000.

Other programs are already maximally pared down – Stolen’s team comprises three people, one of whose salary is supported primarily from Prescott. “We need three people,” Stolen said. “We can’t do our jobs well with two people.”

The John H. Prescott Program was established in 2000 by an amendment to the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972. No more than two grants per year, capped at $100,000 each, can be awarded to a given network partner, most of which are non-profits. Organizations receiving Prescott funding are required to match 30 percent of the grant’s total – a challenge that has helped incentivize other donors, centers say.

Despite the dependence some programs have on the grants, the awards aren’t extravagant. Especially not for the larger stranding programs. “It’s not even close to funding the whole thing,” Swingle says. “It’s not as if this is a gravy train.”

To put things in perspective, the $4 million the grant program provided annually in recent years is equivalent to a rounding error in the more than $600 billion defense budget, and the same price as a 30-second-long Super Bowl ad.

Since 2001, more than $40 million has been awarded to 93 centers in the continental U.S., Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico. Prescott grants have funded everything from trucks to veterinarians to lab analyses to stranding network development and animal rehabilitation efforts.

Marine Mammal Care Center )

Prescott funding helped the Marine Mammal Care Center in Fort McArthur improve their diagnostic technology, hire a veterinarian, and add five new animal enclosures – space that was desperately needed this year when hundreds of sea lion pups came through their doors. “If we had not gotten those funds, imagine what this last year would’ve looked like,” said David Bard, the center’s director. But MMCC was not among the centers receiving a grant this year.

The bad news is that these budget cuts look like they’re going to continue. The fiscal year 2014 budget request currently has no money for the grants.

"NOAA is proposing to eliminate the Prescott Grant Program as part of the President’s efforts to find efficiencies and savings in a constrained fiscal environment," NOAA spokesman David Miller told WIRED in an email today.

“It would be one thing if this program were taking its share of the budget cutting process, but to eliminate completely the only source of federal funding for a national stranding network is, in my opinion, short-sighted,” Swingle said. “It seems really unwise.”

LeBoeuf says NOAA will try to help the network partners as much as possible until funding can be restored for the program. And the network partners, driven by a passion for marine mammal science and conservation, will continue to try and do their jobs as well as they can – no one is giving up yet.

“Our hearts are in it,” West said.

What can you do? “Write your congressman, your senator,” Goertz said. “Is this something the general public wants to see funded? A good way to demonstrate that is through letter writing.”