Two Data Collection Sessions and a Birthday!

We celebrated Melissa’s birthday after dinner with a delicious chocolate cake! Of course, that also meant that the rest of us had to clandestinely sign the birthday card when Melissa was not around (thank you to Heather for capturing our sneaky signing!).

Celebrating Melissa’s birthday was a great way to wrap up our first full day at AKR!

We had two data collection sessions with Champ the first to swim by my MVA and “say” hello. He made several circle swims around my camera in the first morning session.

The underwater visibility was very good today. The unusual thing this morning was that no one came to “greet” me on my first entry. This was a bit unusual but also confirmed that the dolphins were into their own thing and I could observe their exchanges without being involved (so to speak). All the mom/calf pairs (young and older calves) were together in the first session. And the older males were swimming in and around everyone else. The other unique observation from the first session was that it was silent! No dolphin vocals were audible to me or recorded on my MVA. We’ll have to look at the video a bit more to see if we can figure out why.

The second session was just after noon and the visibility was still quite good. There was a bit more socializing and some splashing between French and Lenca and Ronnie and Stan. The calves were a bit more exploratory.

Melissa and Heather did some kayaking and snorkeling. Bill and Ron (participant, not dolphin!) enjoyed two dives each today and Rachel helped me with some dolphin ID confirmation observations. It was a productive day!

Here’s to a good evening and another great day tomorrow.

Cheers

The SSRB 2021 Ecotour group!