Today began with a nice talk on the R/V Coral Reef II to a group of very inquisitive middle school students from Chicago on DCP, our goals as an organization, and the local population of Bimini dolphins. After a great talk and lots of good questions we were invited to eat lunch with them and talk more about dolphins and how we got to be in this field of research. We returned to our apartment to do more data entry before our dolphin trip in the afternoon, only to find out our dolphin trip was canceled, due to some sick guests. But don’t fret; we got invited to go feed stingrays at honeymoon harbor instead! So of course we agreed to this. At 2:30 we headed out on the boat and swung south to Gun Cay’s honeymoon harbor where we snorkeled to the island and proceeded to hand feed somewhere between 4-5 stingrays including a baby! After about 2 hours of feeding the stingrays, snorkeling around the island, and just enjoying the sun we snorkeled back to the boat and headed home. To our surprise, we spotted a small group of bottlenose dolphins a couple of minutes before entering Bimini’s harbor. (Apparently they just couldn’t wait to see us and were sad we didn’t take a trip out, so they came and found us! Ha!) Of course Kel being the good researcher that she is quickly grabbed her camera and got a couple still photos of their dorsal fins. After a few minutes watching the dolphins and taking some pictures we had to say goodbye and continued our way home. Overall it was a surprising, but wonderful day!
Hopefully our next dolphin trip (maybe Saturday) will be as wonderful!
Alexis, Vicki, and Kel