Last Session for this Field Season

We were up and out and then in early on Friday, as is usual. I was in the water by 6:40 am but the visibility was not cooperating – very silty and so the distance was only about 4 meters for me to see or confirm there was a dolphin in view. They had to be within 2-3 m for me to identify them! But, a few of the dolphins were socially active and we recorded some neat sounds – whistles and click trains. The MVA was again wearing the DTag and so the recording bandwidth for the units overall was up to ~86 kHz. For those of you reading this report with an acoustic background, the sample rate was about 170 kHz.

During Wu-Jung’s, visit we were able to collect about 2.25 hours of data with the MVA and DTag simultaneously. It will be very interesting to see the almost full range of the dolphin’s vocalization capability during these observations. The MVA records in the human hearing range, which has a max frequency of about 22 kHz. We’ll keep you posted with updates in future issues of the Dolphin Gazette about these data analyses.

Wu-Jung and Penn departed late this morning and I spent a bit of the afternoon cleaning and drying out my gear to pack it for my departure tomorrow. I did join the trainers for their last session of the day and was able to spend a bit of time with Gracie and her calf. I fed Gracie while the trainers worked with some of the other dolphins. We had a grand time – or at least I did. Gracie was quite tactile and so I enjoyed rubbing her, when she was not retrieving her calf. Gracie’s calf is a bit more than 2 months old and very much self-entertaining! She wanders and just plays and plays. This was a nice way to wrap up my January field season here at RIMS/AKR.


Cheers
Kathleen