15.07.2018 – Who sets the tone?

Oh, how beautiful! As we drove out today, the peaceful mood of the morning was at hand, she lay relaxed, like a magic veil over the water, the early sun conjured stars into the blue and the dolphins and our very, very nice guests were in the best of spirits. Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) with small minis, Rough- Toothed dolphins (Steno bredanensis) and the funny Atlantic spotted dolphins (Stenella frontalis) have made our ride an absolute pleasure.

The Rough-Toothed dolphins our special and summer dolphins welcomed our guests and this should find a special mention here. Today we saw two behaviors in this dolphin species. Some animals loosely moved through the sea, such as our first Rough- Toothed dolphin, who approached the boat and escorted us to the rest of his group 🙂 but we could as well observe there typical synchronized style of swimming. In fact, Rough- Toothed dolphins have two travel techniques. In the first variant, they swim in loose assemblage at different speeds, several animals produce sounds and other conspecifics use their sounds for orientation. In the second variant, the group remains close together. The dolphins match the direction and speed in perfection. In this case, only one animal sets the tone and the rest of the animals are moving based on this dolphins.

During the evening trip there was magic in the air! One of our French guests put it this way: “Magical trip!” Yes, that’s how it was! A cheerful group of super nice guests met a super happy crowd of 200-300 Atlantic spotted dolphins. This is of course an amazing combination! The animals were in the best possible way totally crazy. Today we were not on the Atlantic Ocean, but in the midst of a very magical Spotted Sea. Everything jumped and hopped, a few times even enormously high and the bow wave was extensively used by the dolphins (and the guests :)). We saw as well tiny Spotted mini calves! A small Needlefish jumped into the boat … to seek protection? … of course we put him back in the sea. And a small Loggerhead turtle crossed our path! An exquisite trip and a wonderful finishing for a very, very happy day!

By Fatima Kutzschbach

Sightings of the day

Ribeira Brava

13:30 Bottlenose dolphins

Stenella

09:00 Bottlenose dolphins, Rough-Tooted dolphins, Atlantic Spotted dolphins

18:00 Atlantic Spotted dolphins