Bottlenose dolphins! In honor of our colleagues in Bocas...

Kata here again! We trekked all the way back to David today to meet two new interns
- Conor and Megan, and to do some boat maintenance. On our way we got to travel
through the "estero" (estuary) and admire wildlife we don’t normally get to see. The highlight of our trip was passing through a bay just west of Boca Chica where we saw a group of around twenty bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) feeding! The dolphins were extremely curious and friendly. One dolphin rode along with us under our bow for a long time. We believed the dolphin to be an older calf. These individuals characteristically will stay close to an adult, presumably the mother, and are smaller than full grown adults. The dolphin is also easily identifiable; you can see two distinct dark spots under the left
eye. We use markings like this to monitor individuals and note when we encounter them repeatedly. We plan to be back out on the water tomorrow to do more work with our whales. Let’s hope that the weather stays nice for us!

Bottlenose dolphin surfaces right next to our boat