Last Friday, an injured dolphin swam into Brooklyn's filthy Gowanus Canal, where it became stuck and later died; the ordeal was equal parts captivating and disturbing, and inspired at least one moving tribute. Now comes word that the dolphin probably wasn't killed by anything man-made, news that will hopefully let us all rest a bit better. According to the Riverhead Foundation's Kimberly Durham, who performed a necropsy on the animal, the dolphin likely died from natural causes and not one of the thousands of pollutants in the canal:

A fish shape appeared on Paumanok on Friday morning, carried in on high tide. A dolphin: It had started from the sea and made its way into Brooklyn from without, working along the wood and concrete embankments toward the river head, and by mid-morning it was paused by one of Gowanus's empty lots, surfacing and plunging out of and in to the mucoid black. A gathering crowd of locals and police watched it from the shore; it was hyperventilating and bleeding from its fin. Biologists from the Riverhead Foundation arrived. The next high tide wouldn't be until 7 p.m.

A likely terrified, apparently bleeding dolphin is stranded in the Gowanus Canal — the polluted Superfund site/former Mafia dumping ground running through central Brooklyn. Authorities and dolphin experts are on-scene, but no rescue operation can be attempted until for high tide — at 7 p.m.

The Gowanus Canal's officially a Superfund site. Hmm. Gowanus is still the supercoolest neighborhood, right?