After a short dry spell this week has proved to be an exciting one. We started off with a group of six individuals who were raring to play. One of our more frequent visitors, #16 or 'Dancer' gave us quite a show with her bubble rings and seaweed chases, as well as going after one of the passenger's fins! Also in the group was #41, Cleopatra, who is a beautiful older class 3 and was very interested in us.
Monday was very exciting – we witnessed some possible mating activity in a large group of mostly spotteds, but at least two bottlenose males were involved as well. We watched from the boat for a while, and when we entered the water to observe a bit, the large group took off, leaving us with one bottlenose male and two young spotted females horsing around, rubbing, chasing, and whistling. We were able to get a good sense of how different the whistles from the bottlenose dolphins sound compared to the spotteds.
Yesterday, though there were no underwater encounters with the dolphins, we saw a spectacular display from a young calf (we were not able to identify the mother but we have seen her before and hope to see her again to get a positive ID). Probably less than a year old, this little guy put on quite a show for us, jumping five feet out of the water a total of about ten times!