Dolphins of Slovenia

A new digital booklet, 'Dolphins of Slovenia', was produced by Tilen Genov and Giovanni Bearzi.

This photo booklet is a result of 10 years of work by Morigenos in northern Adriatic waters.

The booklet can be seen in the Digital Media section of the Dolphin Biology & Conservation web site.

Lone common dolphin travels

While common dolphins are often regarded as highly mobile animals, their movements and ranging patterns are poorly known. No long-distance movements have been documented through photo-identification of individually identifiable animals.

A recent paper by Tilen Genov and colleagues reports the long-distance movement of a naturally marked individual, encompassing 1000+ km across the Ionian and the Adriatic Seas. It also describes the subsequent behaviour and site fidelity of the same individual, in association with a calf, in and around the commercial port of Monfalcone, northern Adriatic Sea.

The article can be downloaded HERE.

Common dolphins are becoming rare in the Mediterranean

The time has come to turn good intentions into actual conservation action

Once one of the most abundant cetacean species in the Mediterranean Sea, the short-beaked common dolphin (Delphinus delphis) has declined throughout the region since the 1960s. The primary causes of this decline include prey depletion caused by overfishing and incidental mortality in fishing gear. Today, common dolphins survive only in small portions of their former Mediterranean range, while in most areas they have become rare or are completely absent.

Bottlenose dolphin depredation in Sardinia

Perhaps as a consequence of prey scarcity caused by overfishing, in some Mediterranean Sea areas coastal communities of bottlenose dolphins have specialised in the depredation of fishing nets. While the problem is relatively widespread, it is particularly acute within a Marine Protected Area in western Sardinia, Italy, where angry fishermen blame dolphins for damaging gear and reducing landings.

Monk seals in the Northern Gulf of Evia

On March 18th, 2011 we were following a group of 20 bottlenose dolphins moving away from a polluted bay in the Northern Gulf of Evia, Greece. The dolphins had been feeding around the cages of fish farms located in the bay, in waters contaminated by the discards of a large smelting plant.

The sun had set and light was dim. However, we wanted to take a few more photos of the dolphin's dorsal fins, to allow for individual identification based on natural markings. Much to our surprise, a monk seal head suddenly appeared amidst the dolphin backs.

The animal came close to our inflatable and stopped at about 3 m, staring at us with inquisitive large eyes. This odd situation lasted for what felt like a relatively long time — possibly 10 seconds — giving to Silvia an opportunity of taking close-up photos of her head and range of expressions. The seal seemed unconcerned by the dolphins surfacing all around, but she was very interested in our boat and especially in Silvia, who was carefully inspected.

Then the animal swam away, and it was then that we spotted another monk seal: a juvenile. This one was apparently looking for the adult animal — possibly her mother — elevating her head above the dark-blue waters. A few surfacings and both seals had gone.

The dolphins did not seem to bother and they kept swimming away. We returned to them to take a few more photos before it was completely dark.

Back at the field station, while looking at the beautiful monk seal portraits, we recalled a recent report of an animal being shot in that same area, as well as similar stories told by local fishermen and fish farm workers.

Because Mediterranean monk seals Monachus monachus occasionally depredate fishing gear they get killed by angry fishermen who regard them as vermin. Few shelters exist where a monk seal mother can hide undisturbed and raise her offspring. Their prey is being increasingly depleted by overfishing. Their habitat and food polluted by manmade toxic contaminants. Yet, these two animals had managed to survive under adverse circumstances: an assertion of the species' resilience to eradication.

We were lucky to experience such a close encounter with two of these rare and elusive marine mammals, classified as 'Critically Endangered' in the IUCN Red List. Two monk seals approached our boat and got a few shots — but happily this time it wasn't bullets.

(Photo by S. Bonizzoni)

Studying bottlenose dolphins in a semi-closed basin exposed to acute anthropogenic impacts

When we started our work in the Northern Evoikos Gulf, central Greece, all we knew came from a 2003 scientific article written by the late Dimitris Zafiropoulos — a pioneer of dolphin research in Greece — together with his wife Livia Merlini (1). Dimitris and Livia reported an extremely high density of bottlenose dolphins in these waters.

As of 2010, we had been studying dolphins in the several areas of Greece, as well as in Italy and Croatia. The Northern Evoikos Gulf was a portion of Greece that had long stimulated our interest. We wanted to describe the present conservation status of dolphins in an area of high human impact and compare it with situations found in other places. Such approach can ultimately increase our understanding of cetacean ecology as well as of their responses to human pressures.

Whale Watching Uphill

A recollection

I arrived in Montecastello di Vibio with my father’s motorhome late in the day, parking near the hotel recommended for the international workshop on “Scientific aspects of managing whale watching”. It was the end of March 1995 and the brownish hills of Umbria, in central Italy, were covered by a thin layer of snow. I had managed to be invited at the workshop largely because it was co-organized by Tethys, that back then was my mother organization, but no room had been booked for me at the only hotel in town.

If I already felt a bit like an intruder, spending the night in the parking lot didn’t make things easier. I had a hard time keeping myself warm in the icy night and spent most of it awake, wondering whether I should drive back home in the following morning, and forget about the workshop altogether.

Dolphins, Photography and Dreams

A recollection

Back in my twenties, when I was moving my first steps as a cetology geek, I was assigned the task of recording observations of Mediterranean whales and dolphins by Giuseppe Notarbartolo di Sciara, who was my thesis co-advisor. ‘Find a boat and report what you see’, he said. Back in 1986, little was known about the distribution and ecology of whales and dolphins in the Mediterranean Sea. I managed to board a mid-size oceanographic ship and set out to defy my own seasickness, looking for dorsal fins and flukes from the upper deck of R/V ‘Bannock’, together with my colleague Benedetta Cavalloni.

Our first cruise brought us to the Sicily Channel, where on the second day at sea I made one of my best sightings ever. A mixed group of nine common dolphins and one bottlenose dolphin came to ride the ship’s bow. We had spotted a school of faraway striped dolphins on the previous day, but that event has faded in my memory. The mixed Delphinus / Tursiops group, however, was not going to be forgotten.

The large bottlenose dolphin behaved as the group leader and immediately positioned himself right in front of the bow, enjoying the pressure wave generated by the fast-moving ship and not allowing any of the smaller common dolphin members to gain his apparently privileged position.

I had loaded a roll of black and white film into my Pentax LX all-manual reflex camera, but I soon realized that wasn’t a good way of capturing such a colourful moment. I quickly shot the last B&W photos and inserted a 36-frame roll of colour slides.

The morning light was beautiful and sharp, the dolphins lively and playful. Common dolphins were swimming fast on both sides of the ship, leaping at unison in golden water spry, gliding in the deep-blue water and showing their ochre-coloured flanks and amazing grace. Photography was a serious challenge in those days, and I was absorbed by the difficult task of manually focusing and using the right settings. I knew I was shooting extraordinary images: my first photos of wild cetaceans, a dream come true.

At frame number 36 I was ready to change the roll, but my camera kept shooting. At frame 38 I started worrying a little, but because the film was hand-rolled it wasn’t unusual to get a few additional shots. After frame number 40, however, I grew quite nervous. What was going on there? A layer of fog filled my eyes, and the beauty of the moment disappeared. I kept shooting, pretending that the roll was about to end, but it did not. In my hurry, I had failed to insert the tip of the film deep into the slit of the winder drive: the camera had been shooting on idle since the beginning, as if no roll was loaded. I opened the camera back and frantically reloaded the roll, but by then the sighting was over. The dolphins had left.

Months later, Benedetta and I were invited to present our work to a public of specialists at the Milan Natural History Museum. These included Giuseppe, the eminent cetacean expert Luigi Cagnolaro and two young scientists who had been pioneering field research on cetaceans in the Ligurian Sea: Michela Podestà and Luca Magnaghi. I was given a chance of reporting the results of our surveys and showing the photos and data we had collected in the central and eastern Mediterranean. That was my first public presentation ever, and I felt nervous and uneasy. I desperately wanted to show that Benedetta and I had done a good job, but was way too anxious to make a good impression. At the end of the slide show, after my disappointing talk, someone from the floor asked if we really had sighted common dolphins, particularly in a mixed group. Even back in the mid 1980s such sightings were infrequent: could I please project a slide to document our correct identification of the animals?

It was a moment of panic. No, I couldn't show any slide. I stammered my technical mistake, which made me feel ridiculous and unfit. I can't tell whether at that point I saw ironic smiles and heads shaking in the audience, or it was just my imagination. It felt terrible anyway: I had been unable of documenting an important dolphin observation and couldn’t even manage to use my own camera. How could I stand a chance of ever becoming a cetacean scientist?

After the talk, Giuseppe asked me to show the black and white prints and although these were no Bob Talbot’s, the correct identification of common dolphins in a mixed group was unquestionable. At least our credibility was ok, but that experience was going to leave a lasting shade... in my dreams.

Since then, for many years, I regularly dreamed of extraordinary sightings: orcas swimming in rivers, hundreds of dusky dolphins socialising in beautiful sandy lagoons, sperm whales performing spectacular leaps near my boat. I was there with my camera, excited for the opportunity of documenting something special, but unable of taking a single photo.

Today, after many years, such dreams have stopped bothering me. I may have managed to overcome that particular frustration. Eventually, I can laugh at the experience and tell myself I should have set aside the nonworking camera to simply enjoy the amazing sighting.

Giovanni Bearzi, December 2008