Finally!
After three and a half weeks of photo-ID, we finally got to go out on surveys again!
It's really simple. We drive around on a boat looking for dolphins. When we see them, we take pictures. That's all.
Ha ha. I wish.
It's actually really hard to see the dolphins. You're just sitting on the boat, looking out to the horizon, hoping to see a dorsal fin or two. Waves make this hard, and a dark day where the dolphins are the same colour as the water... for an amateur like myself, it's daunting.
But miraculously, with a little (lot) of help from our supervisors, a pod of dolphins is spotted.
There is a lot of data collected for a sighting. Latitude, longitude, depth, salinity, water temperature, general location and the conditions (glare, cloud cover, sightability and wave height).
Then there's the taking of the pictures. Wouldn't it be nice if dolphins stayed in one place and posed pretty for a picture? Yeah, I think so too. But they don't. So they are swimming around, doing their thing, and we are doing our best to take a photo of their dorsal fin. My supervisors are absolute pros. I am honestly surprised when it turns out I took a half decent photo.
We go out for 10 days a month, which is half the month when all goes well. The weather defines if we can go out, although it doesn't always deter us. We have a route that we have to get through each time, and how long it takes depends on how many sightings we get.
Some highlights from the surveys I've done so far:
--We sometimes see other cool wildlife on surveys. Like manatees, sea turtles and rosiette spoonbills.
-- One of the dolphins is totally habituated to humans, so much so he comes up to the boats to beg for food. His name, no surprise, is Beggar. It's cool when you see him because he comes right up to the boat, so you get really close to a dolphin!
--We saw the oldest dolphin in the population, she's around 60 years old which is amazingly old for a wild dolphin.
-- We've seen some cool socializing and playing
-- Some dolphins have created really cool ways of eating. A couple families will actually chase fish along a sea wall and use that as a means of controlling where the fish swim. There's something known as 'kerplunking', where they slap the fish around with their tails, essentially knocking them unconscious before eating them. Smart cookies.
-- We see a lot of calves and young of the year. AKA really small and cute dolphins.
-- We went out in the rain one morning, boy did it rain HARD! We boated around in the rain all morning, stopped for lunch, and then the sum came out for the afternoon. Hopefully no cold comes from it!
It's a steep learning curve, but our supervisors are pretty patient and really helpful. And besides, in the real world, on the job training means that you have to train while the work is actually being done, so mistakes are easy to make, but certainly not appreciated.
But this is the type of work is the work I love. All I want to do is spend plenty of my days on boats and in the ocean looking out for the animals I love.
Speak Loud!
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