Necropsies will be performed on the carcasses of 17 dolphins that stranded on a beach near Woody Cape in the Eastern Cape.
Officials from the South African Stranding Network at Bayworld in Port Elizabeth will go to the site on Tuesday to also collect samples for analysis.
The dolphins were spotted on the beach on Monday afternoon by Eastern Cape EMS helicopter pilot, Andrew de Bruyn, and his two colleagues while flying back to East London from Port Elizabeth.
He told Algoa FM News that some of the animals were still alive at the time.
De Bruyn said that some of the dolphins also had blood coming from the mouths while others looked like they had lost skin on their bodies.
Bayworld Marine Biologist Dr Greg Hofmeyer says the previous mass stranding of common dolphins on this exact same stretch of coastline was in April last year - and that the topography of the area is believed to play a big factor in these strandings.
He says there have been seven recorded dolphin strandings along the Woody Cape coastline in the past 40-years.
This is the earliest recorded incident in a calendar year, however, with the strandings usually taking place in March and April.
Dr Hofmeyer says as tragic as these deaths are, they're very much a natural phenomena and always involve healthy dolphins.
