Old friends

Hook (Photo: JLewis, TDRF)

Today we found some of our old friends. Hook and Emily. Two big males. Emily was named prior to figuring she was a he. :) We have been following these two guys since 1999. It was great to see that they were both healthy and still hanging around near Key West.

Since we have been in the field, we have been concerned because we have seen very few of the members of the Key West community of dolphins. We are especially worried because what is new is that a local watersports company has basically blocked the entrance to a pass used by these dolphins with watersports vessels and equipment. We will keep you posted about this issue as we continue our field work.

Blocked pass with water sports toys, Key West, Florida (Photo: Jlewis, TDRF)

Being flexible

Working in field ecology means having to constantly improvise because if there is one thing you can count on when doing field work…it is that nothing will ever go as planned. Which is fine! That is part of the adventure!

Right now waiting for the weather to cooperate. Winds have increased this week making it impossible to take up our quadcopter. BUT! We don’t give up easily! We purchased something else incredibly high tech…PVC pipe! We bought a really long piece of pipe and taped the Gopro video camera to the top to see if that might give us some footage we can use if we get close enough to a pod.

We tested it today and think it just might work!

Mud plume feeding…ALMOST captured!

Heading out for another survey (Photo: JLewis, TDRF)

The dolphins we study off the lower Florida keys have a really neat feeding behavior called mud plume feeding. To do this, dolphins create a U shaped plume of mud in the water, and then lunge through it to catch fish(http://www.tropicaldolphin.org/ResearchFeedingHowDoThey.html). 

We have been documenting them doing this since 1999. But we still have many unanswered questions. Like how many times they are successful at catching fish when they do this?

To examine it….means a waiting game must be underway. First we have to wait for the tides to be just right and then the time of day. Then we have to locate dolphins over the right habitat where they perform the behavior…and finally then the dolphins have to perform the behavior (they don’t always).

Now that we are filming from above….with a quadcopter…we also need two further criteria…..no rain and low wind.

Blip (Photo: JLewis, TDRF)

Today we got all of the above….with the exception of enough mud plumes to give us time to get the copter into the air to film it. We had run into two old dolphin friends….Poweraide and Blip. After a few hours they finally moved into an area where they do mud plume feed…and then they started to do it….and almost as soon as they started they stopped and then moved into deeper water.  

Poweraide (Photo: JLewis, TDRF)

The Quadcopter Works!

This season we are using a quadcopter to help us answer questions about dolphin behavior. The aerial vehicle has a

Quadcopter with GoPro (Photo: JLewis)

small video camera mounted below it. Looking at dolphins from above gives us the ability to see what they are doing under the surface. We can then answer many more research questions we could not any other way. And the best part is we do it without disturbing the animals.

Many folks ask us if we get into the water with the dolphins we study. We don’t. And people are always surprised by this answer. The reason we don’t is 1) getting into the water with them would increase the level of disturbance to them, 2) the visibility while good, is not good enough to see much more than 20 feet and 3) dolphins are not usually interested in humans and do not stay long when they encounter them, so it would hard to collect much data.

We spent a significant amount of time practicing on land, and now have begun to use it on the water. See the short video below to get an idea of what the copter can capture for us!

What is it really like to do research?

If you love the outdoors, you would love being a field biologist. To those of us lucky enough to get this opportunity….there is nothing better. But not every day, just like every other job, is perfect. For our work, we depend on two major things….our boat and the weather. Both decided to give us issues as soon as we arrived for our field season.

June 1, the day we arrived, was actually the first day of hurricane season for the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean. And low and behold a tropical system started to develop over us and the Yucatan. This kept us under rain and wind for our first three days.

We finally got to put the boat into the water on our fourth day. Got the boat to the gas pump at the marina. Tried to leave, but the steering wheel was tight. Steering lines are notorious for getting corroded and freezing up. It is just a given that you will have to replace these every so often. Was super tight, but I had managed with not much effort to just get across the water to the marina and then to the gas pump. This time, no budging. Had to get another boater to help us, getting them to try and move the engine (which is what the steering will control), while I tried to pull on the wheel. When the wheel suddenly came off! Completely! Have had a lot of stuff happen to our many boats over the years…but that was a first.