The hooligans

Return of the prodigal sons

No boat trips today – the sea was pretty rough. I took advantage of my day on shore to do some video analysis. It is an unglamorous task whereby I go through the video frame by frame and try to determine the ID of each of the dolphins that appear on-screen. It is often quite difficult if there is no obvious scarring on the dolphin or if the picture quality is poor. But a mammoth session allowed me to ID the entire video I collected from yesterday’s trips. I managed to get the ID of 26 individual dolphins from just the one day. Not so bad! And a few of those dolphins were adult males. We don’t see them very often around here. We usually bump into groups of adult and subadult females and of course the rambunctious subadult males. But adult males don’t seem to spend too much time around Mikura. Who knows where they hang out! Probably in some unsavory deepwater trench where they can scare up trouble. They are a nasty looking bunch – usually quite heavily scarred. They give the impression of being rough and tumble Wild West types: #004, the guy who gave me The Jaw yesterday, was one of these gruff adult male hooligans. Not the kind of dolphin you want to meet in a dark alley at night. Although I don’t know what a dolphin would be doing on land in an alley. I hope to get on a boat tomorrow to see who else is out there!

-Justin