Our last early morning began well, but was cut short because
Polly and Ronnie decided my fins were just too tempting! I did not want to stay
in and reward their playful behavior since I’d prefer the dolphins to ignore
me. I am focused on recording dolphin-dolphin interactions, not inquisitive
actions toward me. But, the second session was awesome! The younger dolphins
were very playful and allowed to play for about 15 minutes until they got a bit
over-excited. That’s when the moms took charge and corralled their youngsters
into infant position for a collective time out. Or at least that’s what they
looked like they were doing since the mom/calf pairs were all visible for about
5 minutes. Then the play resumed but at a lower level.
There was much vocal activity – lots of whistles and buzzing
and a few squawks audible too. Champ was whistling often and had a bubble
stream almost constantly.
Our group had a dolphin encounter and swim at 10:30; they
interacted with Alita, who was a bit distracted by Lenca coming over to visit a
few times. Their swim was fun and one of the dolphins brought over a dead
lionfish as a treasure from the sea!
We recovered the SM2M from its recording post – thankfully the
PAM recorder is positively buoyant and it came right to the surface once we
removed the weights. Getting the 28 lbs of weight to the surface took a bit
more effort!
We head home tomorrow – it’s been a wonderful week and far
too long (at 2.5 yrs) since my last visit. I’ll look at the data on the SM2M
card early this coming week and will post another summary field report once I
assess the amount of data collected this week. Thank you again to all of our
Fund-A-Geek sponsors for your donations to make this research trip possible.
Cheers
Kathleen & the DCP RIMS 2013 team