Trip #4 2001 – Summary

Any day we see dolphins is a good day.

Here is the summary for Trip #4 for DCP's data collection in our study of the communication and behavior among Atlantic spotted dolphins north of Grand Bahama Island. We had 12 spotted dolphin sightings, 4 bottlenose dolphin sightings and 8 'other' sightings (including several sharks). The number of dolphins in a group per sighting or encounter ranged from 1 to 18. We had 7 encounters and 10 short encounters. Encounter lengths ranged from 3 to 32 minutes with a mean of 11.2 min and a median of 8 minutes. We were in the water with dolphins for more than 78 minutes! This from 51 hours of effort which yields a 2.56% return on our effort. We saw about 35 individual spotted dolphins and about 20 individual bottlenose dolphins. The spottted dolphin ID's that we know (before analyzing the photographich data) include: #39 (Doubledot), #103 (Echo), #26 (Doublepoint), #25 (Spade), #60 (Sadie), #112 (Mia), and #114 (Concordia). We had a great trip and a great summer field season. We will be busy this fall with photo-ID work and behavioral and sound data analyses. We will be posting updates to our web site about every 2-3 weeks. There will be a separate section on the online reports. Look to the 'What's New Section' on our home page for when these updates will begin. We hope to see you with us in the Bahamas next summer … or at least following along with us through these reports. Cheers Kathleen