Wednesday morning began with a photo-ID lecture to the students. I always like this topic – discussing how we recognize individual dolphins and all the cool things you can learn just by knowing who is who. The students asked great questions and did a fantastic job practicing matching photos to the DCP catalog.
Tuesday was the first boat trip of 2016. I was thrilled to welcome Dr. K back to Bimini, this time with Dr. L and students from Saint Mary’s College of Maryland. With all the gear prepped, I introduced the students to DCP’s still cameras and underwater slates. I also gave them tips on taking underwater photographs of the dolphins with photo-ID purposes in mind. Throughout their course, they will be tasked with taking photographs of and notes on the dolphins while observing them under water.
DCP is offering a brand new field course in collaboration with Dr. Shane Kanatous, Colorado State University.
This is a Field Course in Animal Behavior and Physiology that will be held at RIMS, Anthony's Key Resort, Roatan, Honduras, from 31 December 2016 to 7 January 2017. A flyer can be downloaded by clicking this link. You can also check out the Educational - College Programs section of DCP's web site to read more details about this exciting new field program!
Sign up today to be sure you have a spot in this college-level field program.
DCP DE Innovative Study 2016 from Dolphin Communication Project on Vimeo.t
Here is a short video that showcases the Innovative Study we conducted at Dolphin Encounters at Blue Lagoon Island in The Bahamas in late January/early February 2016! If you remember (or look back through our blogs), this was research conducted in collaboration with Drs. Deirdre Yeater and Dawn Melzer (Sacred Heart University) and Dr. Allison Kaufman (University of Connecticut) and Kathleen (DCP) at Dolphin Encounters.
Data processing and analyses are ongoing ...
Saturday was our travel day to return home. Sunday was a recovery day from a very productive, action-filled week and a long day of return travel! You can see from this photo that Dixie was very glad I was home … and she and I took a good nap on the couch on Sunday!
Our trip was productive in that I collected about 3.5 hrs of video on the video camera and another almost 1.5 hrs of concurrent GoPro footage. Our team of 13 St.
Today - Friday – was our last full day on Roatan, unfortunately!
We finished analyzing our soil samples – yeah! We did our last morning observation at 6:30 AM – maybe we can sleep in tomorrow? The dolphins were quite curious about Dr. D but she got a full 30-minute session recorded.
After breakfast, we went to the classroom to listen to Jennifer give a talk about turtles. There are 7 different species and only the females come on land, to lay eggs. These turtles cannot retract into their shells.
DCP is pleased to offer our supporters the chance to look good in classic white tees and rash guards. Short-sleeve tees are available in adult and youth sizes. Long-sleeve tees and rash guards are available in adult sizes only.
Tees are pre-shrunk, 100% combed ringspun cotton with shoulder-to-shoulder taping and double-needle stitched sleeves and bottom hem. Adult sizes are unisex; women may want to size down for a more fitted look.
Rash guards have UPF50+ sun protection and moisture wicking.
Not only did we do research in the morning, but we swam with the dolphins, too!
Not only did we have a great breakfast followed by an interesting acoustics lecture but we swam with the dolphins, too!
Not only did we do more water sampling and dolphin behavior observations for our individual projects but we swam with the dolphins, too!
Not only did we have a spectacular lunch, but we swam with the dolphins, too!
Our swim with the dolphins was in the early afternoon.
Dolphins and Dolphins – with timing help to make our scan sample observations more efficient. We had a few students from Iowa State join us to watch the dolphins! It was a very eventful morning with dolphins that ignored Kathleen and were very social – lots of leaps! Kathleen had to retrieve a dropped-in-the-water pair of sunglasses and a towel.
A wolf discussion followed breakfast – odd since we are studying dolphins. But, Dr. Karlin’s presentation about red wolves was neat and we learned wolves can interbreed with coyotes.
It was a Long, Long Day!! But it was a very good day! We made some dolphin observations this morning – seeing much socio-sexual play. Breakfast was really good! And it fortified us for the snorkel boat trip, which was the first time for most of us on a boat and to jump off the boat into water! We saw an eagle ray, squirrelfish, parrot fish, lots and lots of starfish, many fan corals and lots of tiny fish.