Sarah Sharp 0:05
The biggest dolphin stranding that I’ve ever been a part of was actually last June. Our day started with a single dolphin Stranding. So we got an early, probably 5:30am call about a single stranded dolphin, and so our team responding. We got the animal on the road. Animal looked good. We were very happy with how the animal was doing during the transport. We released the animal. We watched him swim up. It was a great morning. The sun was shining. We saw the sun rise. I mean, it was it was picturesque. And as we’re walking back to our rescue truck, we get another call and somebody says, Oh gosh, we think that there’s 10 dolphins stranded in well fleet. As we were driving back to well fleet, our volunteers were getting on scene, the numbers just kept going up and up and up. So at first it was, we think there’s 10, oh, I think that there’s 20. Oh, they’re in a really bad spot in this really tricky place, there’s bad mud really far, you know, so we’re gonna have to walk really far to get to them. And so the bad wings kind of kept coming and coming. And I remember pulling in to this area, and I remember looking out, and I had binoculars on, and I could count. And when I got to 50 animals, I said, All right, I’m gonna go back. I’m gonna get my things, and I’m gonna head down there. And it actually ended up being a stranding of 146 Atlantic white sided dolphins. Atlantic. White sided dolphins are also really big animals, so they usually weigh about 300 400 kilos. We knew in that moment that we would not be able to take all those animals out of that area, put them into our transport vehicle, and transport them the way that we normally do our rescues. So we knew we were gonna have to refloat those animals in place. I was just playing in my head what this was going to look like with 146 of some of the biggest dolphins we’d ever had to manage. We called out every volunteer. We made. Called out our colleagues that were neighbouring. We said, please come. We need all the hands that we can get to help with these animals. And so we had to kind of change our Response Paradigm on a dime, and had to adapt to the scene, because we just wanted to save as many animals as we could. We had about a two hours before the tide came lushing back in and they were going to start to swim again. We assessed them. We saw how they were doing. We also tried to give them some supportive care. So we tried to make them as comfortable as possible. A lot of them were lying on oyster shells. And so they were getting cut on their underside, and so we tried to remove as much of the oyster shells as we could from under them. We placed sheets to prevent them from getting sunburned. We cooled them down. We put buckets of water on them gently so that they could thermo regulate as the tide was coming in. Some of the animals tip onto their side, and that’s really dangerous for them, because they breathe out of a blow hole on the top of their head, and so that needs to be out of the water. And so they can drown pretty easily if they’re on their side in shallow water. So we were just running from dolphin to dolphin, getting them up right, and getting them swimming. There were probably 30 of us on site for that period of time running between the 146 animals, and then finally, as the tide had kind of risen enough that they were all swimming, we were watching them, and we deployed two of our vessels to try to encourage them to go in the right direction so they weren’t going further inland. They were going out. A few of the animals did die during the refloat. We did everything we could. But there were a few animals that couldn’t make it. There were some little calves that just had a really hard time with the stress of it. But we were able to save and we felt like we were pretty confident that we were able to release 130 of the 146 that day. The amazing thing to me was that very few of them actually re stranded after that. One of the coolest things was that we had a lot of Whale Watch boats out that that time of year, because it was summertime, and so we kept getting reports from the Whale Watch boats saying that they were seeing our tagged dolphins fall offshore, feeding and swimming and doing dolphin things. And so that part was incredible, and we really didn’t get many of them back. That was a huge, huge success for our team, and we’re thrilled that the Dolphins are back swimming in the wild.

Anna Bunney 4:42
This is oceans, life underwater, the series exploring our oceans and the fascinating life within them. I’m Hannah stitful. I’m a zoologist, wildlife filmmaker and broadcaster, and I’m bringing you along as I learn everything I can about our watery planet. This week, we’re diving into the world. One of the most intelligent creatures on the planet, dolphins. You probably think you know them pretty well, from their complex social bonds to their playful leaps above the surface, but we’re taking it to a whole new level in this episode, and I bet you’ll leave with at least one mind blowing fact that you didn’t know before. This is oceans life underwater.

My first guest today is a marine conservationist educator and self proclaimed dolphin enthusiast. She is the Head of Education and vessel strike lead at Orca, a charity who are protecting whales and dolphins in waters around the world. Hello, Anna, thank you for joining us today in the studio. Thank you really happy to be here. So for the listeners, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at Orca? Yeah.

Speaker 1 5:55
So my name’s Anna bunny, and I’m Head of Education at Orca. And orca are a whale, dolphin and porpoise conservation charity based here in the UK, we work to protect whales, dolphins and porpoises for future generations. And

Anna Bunney 6:08
how did you get involved with this job? I mean, is it something that’s always fascinated you? You’ve always wanted to do it? Yeah,

Speaker 1 6:15
for sure. I mean, like most young girls, loved dolphins. Had all the memorabilia, the posters, the pens. When I was a young teenager, I remember going up to Scotland with my family and seeing the bottlenose dolphins in the Moray Firth. Have you ever been to channelery point? No, I haven’t. I’d love you to show it’s amazing. You see these huge bottlenose dolphins. They’re four metres long, feeding on these huge salmon, literally 10 metres away from the shore, and that kind of experience has stayed with me for life, really. And went off to university and did geography, focused on wildlife conservation, did quite a lot of volunteering, and then, yeah, got my dream job with Orca. Oh, wow. I think I was in the right place at the right time, but I think that, yeah, that interests definitely since I was really young. So can you

Anna Bunney 7:01
give us a bit of a brief overview of dolphins? Okay, so what makes them so unique and special? Yeah,

Speaker 1 7:08
so many, so many different reasons. So first of all, they’re marine mammals. A lot of people think they’re fish, but they’re not. They’re mammals. So they breathe air, which is great, because they have to come to the surface, giving us humans a great opportunity to spot them. They give birth to live young, and the young suckle milk from their mothers, and they’ll stay with their mothers for a long time. You know, the mothers really put a lot of energy into each of their each of their babies. They just have one calf every few years. They’re not having lots and lots of animals, so they’re quite slow growing, long, living creatures. They like other mammals, they have hair, they have little whiskers around their face, but most of them lose this within a couple of months of their life, and they’re warm blooded as well, so they have a thick layer of fat all around their body called their blubber, which helps to keep them nice and warm. And dolphins that live in tropical areas will have a thin layer of blubber, whereas the dolphins that you get sort of in the Arctic or near the Antarctic, they’ll have a really thick layer of blubber. So they live all around the world. There’s loads of different types of dolphins as well. They’re intelligent and they’re sociable. They’re just fascinating animals as well. Do you know how many species of dolphin there are in the world? Tell us 4242 really, and most of them belong to the oceanic dolphin family. But then there’s four families of river dolphins and one species in each of those. So there’s five different families. So

Anna Bunney 8:25
in terms of other marine mammals, I mean, how do dolphins compare with, you know, social behaviour and intelligence.

Speaker 1 8:36
They are super intelligent. I mean, second to humans, they’ve got the largest brains in terms of their size anyway, they have extremely well developed brains as well. So they’re known to feel emotions just like us as well, like empathy, for example. And they are extremely clever as well. And it’s quite hard to measure sort of dolphin intelligence, because we measure it as doing a maths test or something, but it’s quite hard to measure in the animal kingdom, but we know that they communicate with each other using their Co Location, and they they’re known to sort of deposit their poo on reefs, and that makes the reefs grow. So they’re ecosystem engineers, and other species of fish will also feed on their on their faeces and they’re sick. Actually, they’re really like key animals in the in the animals kingdom, and they’re apex predators, so they’re right the top of the food chain. So they’re really indicators of a healthy environment as well. But yeah, their intelligence is just in their terms, their feeding strategies. So you see them sort of herding fish up onto muddy banks to make them easier to catch. They’ll circle big groups of fish to the surface to make them easier to catch as well. They’ll stun fish by using really amazing tail slaps as well. So yeah, just so many different things that we love, and I’m gonna have to retry and stay on track, because I always go off on a tangent. They get really excited. So as you just said, that dolphins are known to be able to show emotions. Can you think of any specific examples where we’ve been able to see this? Yeah, I think a good example is where they show that they have a good memory. I think that’s quite a good measure of intelligence. They’re known to recognise dolphins, even if they’re not with them every day for up to 20 years. And they have their signature whistles, which are kind of like names, Putting it simply for each other. So I think that’s quite a show of intelligence as well. I mean, I think we’re just scratching the surface, so I’m probably going to mention this quite a lot, but dolphins are a really well studied group of animals, but I really think that there’s just so much more to discover. And I think over the years, we’ll learn more and more and more about how incredible these animals are. Can

Anna Bunney 10:50
you tell us a bit about the different types of dolphins that can be found in UK waters, and are there any species that are particularly common or rare here?

Speaker 1 10:58
Yeah, so we get at least seven different species of dolphin on a fairly regular basis. So we see bottlenose dolphins, common dolphins, lambic white sided dolphins, a few others, and then up to sort of your orcas. So orcas are the largest species of dolphin. Despite the name killer whale, they’re actually a species of dolphin. So we are so lucky to see these animals right on our doorstep. And it’s those encounters with dolphins right here, sort of at home, that I think are the most special. So a lot of people think you have to go to Antarctica or Alaska to see whales and dolphins, and that’s great. But if you put in a bit of time and bit of research, you can see them right here, which is just phenomenal, really.

Anna Bunney 11:39
And have you managed to see orca in the UK before? Yes, I

Speaker 1 11:43
have, I’ve been very lucky. I have seen them in in Kirkwall Harbour. It was quite a fleeting glimpse, but just amazing to see them on home soil.

Anna Bunney 11:50
How did you how did you feel when you when you saw it and you knew it was an Orca?

Speaker 1 11:54
Orcas, they’re quite easy to identify, but when you see them out in the field, you kind of have to wait for them to surface two or three times before you make that final call. Because if you shout orcas, everyone gets really excited. Then it turns out to not be an Orca. It can be obviously, it’s quite funny, and you can laugh about it, but you sort of holding your breath. And then when you know it’s an Orca, you just get so excited, getting goosebumps just thinking about it. Actually, it’s just the most incredible feeling. I So

Anna Bunney 12:21
is there a difference between Arctic dolphins and Pacific dolphins?

Speaker 1 12:32
Yes, it depends on kind of where in the world. So the Arctic obviously stretches both. We have different species, but they’re also some similar species, and they’re probably now getting a bit more genetically distinct from each other, but the common dolphins you’ll see in both but up in the Arctic, we see, yeah, the white beak dolphin, but the Orca. So the Orca is the most widespread of the of the cetaceans. It’s actually probably one of the most sort of widespread animals on the planet, because you can see them right up to the North Pole, right down to the South Pole, and in every ocean. But I don’t know if I’m going to go off on a tangent, but there are that’s really different types of orcas around the world, about 13 different eco types. So these different eco types vary between size, their appearance, their dialects, what they feed on, and their feeding strategies as well. And all that knowledge is passed down from generation to generation. So another example of intelligence as well. So yeah, you can see orcas everywhere, basically. But there are differences between the species that you see where where you are in the world.

Anna Bunney 13:32
How did we work out that they speak different dialects?

Speaker 1 13:37
A lot of research. So I guess, I guess it’s through hydrophones and just, you know, learning about recording and hours and hours of dialects. I think most of the research has probably been done off vancouver island into the the transient and the resident orcas that they get there, they know that they’re sort of speaking different dialects.

Anna Bunney 13:56
Are they are so say the transient and resident ones, they speak different dialects. Are they able to talk to each other? Talk to each other? Sorry, more fun than this, but, I mean, we

Speaker 1 14:08
do that all the time, don’t we? As far as I understand it, I don’t think they do. I think they’ll recognise each other, but yeah, perhaps not. And they certainly won’t breed into breed between the two groups. Really, yeah, definitely, they’re really distinct. In fact, some researchers argue that they should be 13 different species of Orca, because you get them or these different ones all around the world. And just some example of the how they’re different is quite good to look at what they’re feeding on. So for example, in South Africa, you get the orcas that feed on the great white sharks. So they really are the top predator the ocean. They bite a huge chunk out of the great white shark size, the liver pops out, and they just eat the liver, just the liver, just living, nothing else, the most nutrient rich part of the shark’s body. So for a while, these sharks are washing up on the beach in South Africa with huge chunks out their sides, and no one knew why. And then we saw the hunting of A. Of orcas eating these great white sharks. And then you have the orcas around New Zealand that have specialised to be on stingrays, so they’re really careful feeders to avoid the stingy tail. And then around the UK, we get fish eating orcas. We get mammal eating orcas. And then you get at least four different eco types of orcas down in sort of Antarctica. So you get the ones that create the big waves across on the ice to knock the seals off. Yes. So just amazing. They get the ones that specialise on feeding on whales. So because orcas hunt in packs, they can feed on animals much bigger than themselves. So orcas have been known to hunt down blue whales, the biggest animal that’s ever lived, 33 metres long. So yeah,

Anna Bunney 15:38
it just, it just reaffirms how intelligent they really are. I mean, you know, just to take the liver from a great white shark, they know that that’s the most nutrient part, yeah, you know, and to work in groups and the

Speaker 1 15:53
cooperation that you need as well, yeah. And then it’s been documented a lot going just going back to Antarctica with the older orcas teaching the young ones how to hunt the seals that are on a ice floe, on iceberg, you know, and the you see the little young ones spy hopping. That’s when they stick their head out of the water. They have a little visual look around, and they’re watching their their parents or their siblings, you know, hunting the seals so that they can then have a go at it themselves. And actually, I was lucky enough to be in Antarctica back earlier this year. And it wasn’t that part of orcas, different one that hunt on penguins, yeah, and we saw orcas hunting penguins, but they weren’t feeding on it. They were just playing. And there was quite a lot of young ones, maybe four or five young ones in that pod. And they were obviously the adults were teaching them, you know, this is how you kill it, but we just have a little play this time we’re not gonna, not gonna eat it little chin strap penguins, oh, a bit gruesome.

Anna Bunney 16:50
Well, they’ve got back to dolphins. Dolphins are known for their playful behaviour. Can you explain their playfulness, and how do these behaviours benefit them in the wild?

Speaker 1 17:04
Yeah, so they are very playful, and I think that’s also linked to their intelligence, and it’s, I think it’s why that humans love dolphins so much, is because they’re just amazing to watch. So you’ll see them, yeah, like jumping out of the water. We call it breaching, when they sort of jump out and do a slap, tail slapping, pectoral fin slapping. We don’t know 100% the reason why they’re doing these, but we think that it’s for communication. So not only do they use clicks and squeaks and whistles through echolocation, but they’ll use those splashes to either alert the rest of the pod to like dangers, or there’s lots of food here, or, Hey, let’s just have a little bit of fun. They might use it to remove parasites on their bodies as well, for that breaching, but yeah, also just for fun. And when we are on the ferry, we often see big pods of especially common dolphins, or striped dolphins, splash on the horizon. They make a real beeline for the ship because they’re coming in to play with the bow wave and the Wake so the pressure wave that the boat’s creating as it’s going along. And they just love playing in that, getting a bit of a free ride coming along with it. So they’re extremely playful. And I think it does benefit them, benefit them, because they’re intelligent animals. They need to like enrichment as it were, yeah, you might want to call it, but yeah, again, shows their intelligence and how they just do things for fun like we

Anna Bunney 18:25
do, yeah, when we do something for fun, we feel good afterwards. It’s the same premise, exactly. And

Speaker 1 18:30
if they’ve successfully fed for the day, they’ve had a nice little rest, what else they gonna do with that time? Go and have fun a

Anna Bunney 18:37
species, after my own heart. Now they do have complex social structures. Can you tell us a bit about how life in the pod works? Yeah.

Speaker 1 18:47
So generally, dolphins are in fairly large pods, anything from like three or four of them, up to 1000s. So you can see super pods. I’ve heard about these super pods before. They come together, they might feed or just travel together. I haven’t been lucky enough to see one, but some of my colleagues have. And so there’s just, you know, amazing. They get them quite a lot of California, really sort of rich ecosystems there. And generally, they’ll have a calf once every few years, and the calf sometimes will stay with the pod and sometimes won’t. And again, it varies between species, and they are quite fluid, like in the pod, the males will go off and mate and then with another pod, and then come back. The best example, sorry, to go back to orcas again, but they are a species of dolphins, so we can talk about them. But they are amazing. So they are extremely long lived animals. The females can live over 90 years old. There’s some cases where they’ve lived over 100 years old, but they go through menopause, and that’s because they’re still worth being alive and passing down that knowledge, even if they’re not reproducing, which is amazing. And the male orcas are big mus boys, and they stay in their pod for life if. Will go off and mate with other pods. Then they’ll always come back. And if one of the females in the group has a female sibling, the female will probably go off onto another, another pod. The male will stay, stay with the mum. So the males are much more successful if they have an elder female in their pod, that might be their mother or their grandmother, because they really help them out. They tell them, I’ll go and feed on that

Hannah Stitfall 20:22
same as us. Yeah, sorry.

Speaker 1 20:25
I mean, it’s and it’s way more complex than that, but just very simply, just shows you the dynamics that are going on underneath the waves of these animals. Like, you know, going off, they’ll join other pods for feeding, as I mentioned. But yeah, individuals will go off a mate and then come back to the pod. Just incredible again. We don’t really know all the dynamics that are going on. There’s still so much to discover as well. And

Anna Bunney 20:47
are there big differences between social structure from species to species? So say, like the Orca and the bottlenose dolphin, I

Speaker 1 20:57
think there are. But I think there’s probably a lot of other complex sort of social structures going on in other dolphin species as well. So orcas and bottlenose dolphins are probably the most well studied, but I think there’s these complex social structures going on in probably all dolphin species around the world. They might be more complex, but they’re just not as the research isn’t as heavily focused on them, for example, and how do they communicate with each other? So they use echolocation. So they their nose is on top of their head, and in their nose, they have a just underneath between their nose and their brain. They have a set of phonic lips so and that’s where they create those clicks and squeaks and whistles. So it’s kind of like letting air out of a balloon and pulling the neck, they’ve got the set of phonic lips there, and those sounds pass back to the back of the skull. They get reverberated forwards through the melon. So you might notice that all dolphins have quite a bulbous forehead. There’s a big fatty organ there, which helps, like, concentrate the sound that passes out into the ocean hits a solid object, usually, like the swim bladder of a fish, and that the Echo, the sound coming back goes to an organ in the lower jaw, which sends signal, send signals to the dolphins brain about how far away the animal is, its shape, its size, its density, everything like that. And then the dolphin can really accurately build up a picture. It’s like an ultrasound of what’s around them. And some of the dolphin species are sending out like 80 clicks a second to build up a really good picture of their environment. And you’ll see them sort of moving their heads from side to side. There’s some quite good footage of dolphins trying to find like a squid buried in the seabed, in the sand, and they’re just looking for differences in density. And they’ll bury their beak into the sand and catch, catch the fish. Wow. But they usually use the whistles for communicating and then the clicks for echolocation, so for foraging and for navigation as well. So

Anna Bunney 22:44
they they use echolocation and whistles. I mean, how good is their vision? Do they do? They need vision.

Speaker 1 22:50
They have good eyesight. They can see well outside of the water. They have a special sort of film on their on their eyes, and they can see well underneath the water. But of course, when you go a few metres down to the water. It gets quite dark, quite muddy, quite murky. That’s why they don’t use eyesight. They use sound as their primary sense, which again highlights why noise pollution is quite a big issue. Because these animals are trying to communicate, and if there’s too much noise going on, they can’t do that, and that’s a really important life function for them. A good example is that Amazon River dolphin. Who were? They’re blind, so they they can’t see, but other dolphins, they do, because they live in the murky waters of the Amazon River, so they don’t need their eyesight, because that Echolocation is so great.

Anna Bunney 23:32
Can you tell us some more fun facts about dolphins, some stuff that maybe we wouldn’t know?

Speaker 1 23:38
I’ve got so many so dolphins use tools that’s good. Well, I should have said that when we’re talking about intelligence. Talking about intelligence. So they’ll use like sponges to help protect their beaks. When they’re digging into the sand for food. They actually go we know that Indo Pacific dolphins in the Red Sea, they go to spa days.

Hannah Stitfall 23:58
If I was a dolphin, I’d be Indo Pacific.

Speaker 1 24:01
So they’ve figured out how to use corals and sponges to take care of their skin. So this is the first time a whale, dolphin or porpoise has been documented like self medicating. So what they do is rub up against certain types of corals and sponges, which produce compounds that might help guard the dolphin skin against infection. Love it. Love it. Spa day, love it. I mean, the main fact I always go to, but we’ve already covered it, is that orcas are the largest species of dolphin, because people think, oh, killer whale, it’s a whale, but it’s not, it’s a dolphin. And there’s, I think there’s about eight species of dolphin that have whale in the name, like the pilot whales, melon headed whales and killer whales. Actually, I have a really good fact, and I actually won a pub quiz on this once. Do you know what the difference is between a dolphin and a porpoise? No, so there are a number of differences. So Porpoise is generally smaller. Porpoise have like quite a rounded face, as it were, and a really e collapsible triangle dorsal fin, whereas dolphins have more of a slicked back dorsal fin, which kind of points towards their tail. So. And generally have, like, quite a long beak, but it’s the shape of their teeth that’s the main difference. Oh, so dolphins have really sharp, cone shaped teeth, and I’ll use those for catching fish and squid. And they catch them. Use those teeth for grabbing they haven’t got any like, molars in the back of their mouths like we do, and they swallow their fish hole or squid, and they’ll always eat at head first, so it goes down a bit easier, whereas porpoises have really flat like spade shaped teeth. So that is the difference between a dolphin and a porpoise.

Anna Bunney 25:29
And how important are dolphins for our oceans? Super important,

Speaker 1 25:34
again, the top of the food chain. So the indicator species indicators of a healthy environment. I’d also actually call them ecosystem engineers as well, because they have such great benefit to other species around them. Not only being top of the food chain, do they sort of manage the populations of the animals beneath them, but as I’ve mentioned, you know, they can fertilise corals as well. They can help fish feed some as I mentioned before, some fish feed on their faeces and they’re sick and so they’re, yeah, really important for our for our ecosystem, so we need to do as much as we can to help protect them for the future. And

Anna Bunney 26:10
what are some of the biggest threats facing dolphins today, particularly in UK waters, I

Speaker 1 26:17
probably say by catch is the biggest threat. So this is where any any cetaceans, any dolphin, porpoise, or some whales, get caught up in fishing nets. And the particular problem for dolphins and other small cetaceans like the porpoises, are the gill nets, which is a big curtain of net hanging from the the ocean. They get caught up in it. So there’s so many non target species, they’ve got the turtles, sharks, everything, and they can’t get up to the surface to breathe, so they end up suffocating. And we know that hundreds of dolphins, and at least 250 common dolphins every year get caught around the UK, so it’s a huge threat, and lots of porpoises as well. It’s a big because they’re smaller, so they get caught up more often, often in coastal areas, and they really can’t hold their breath for very long either. So that, if I was to pick one that that is the biggest threat to dolphins

Anna Bunney 27:06
and what, what’s being done to protect them?

Speaker 1 27:09
So various initiatives like sometimes they put pingers on nets that kind of deter. Deter. In some cases, yeah, it has been quite successful. If we think about Minky whales, which are the smallest whale, they found a new way to weight the nets, which have reduced by catch for minke whales as well. But because it’s such a big threat, quite a lot is being done to obviously stop it. A really good example, though, is in the Bay of Biscay. Last winter, for a whole month, certain types of fishing were banned because of the number of common dolphins that we’re getting to have in fishing nets, so things like that are doable by the local governments. So that’s certainly a really good case study for perhaps finding a way, a way forwards for

Anna Bunney 27:54
that. Can you tell us a little bit about the work that happens at Orca?

Speaker 1 27:57
Yep, so we do lots. We’re a small charity. We’re based in Portsmouth, and all of our work is citizen science. So we train up volunteers, members of the public, anyone from any background can get involved. So our surveys are monitoring work, because we’re out there pretty much every month of the year on most of our the ferry routes that we work on. So we use the UK ferry network. We call them platforms of opportunity, or the ships that we work on, because owning and running a boat is very expensive, so we use other people’s ships, and they’re fantastic platforms for monitoring Wales and opens and seeing them. The volunteers that go out on the ferry network are called, are marine mammal surveyors, and they’re looking for these animals in real, real time. We’re out there all the time, we’re being alerted to any changes in real time as well, which is great. And then all of that data is used to inform conservation policy. Have our ocean watches app, and anyone can get involved by training up to use the app to survey for whales and dolphins and orpuses, either from land or at sea. And also, we have lots of education work as well. So we have our ocean conservationists. They’re based on some of the ferry routes that we operate on, and also cruises with cruise companies all around the world. So now, well, we’re a UK based charity, but we’re collecting data worldwide. And what

Anna Bunney 29:16
are some of the key findings you found through the citizen science programmes you run. Yeah.

Speaker 1 29:22
So every year we release our state of cetaceans reports, so we have a look at all the data that we’ve been collecting. We’re seeing changes in distributions. We’re seeing sort of hot spots for creatures coming up. And just shows how much everything is changing. So we’re starting to see populations of porpoises moving further. You know, we’re seeing common dolphin distributions moving further north, and it’s all and then we can investigate why that’s happened, really.

Anna Bunney 29:48
Yeah, I love citizen science. I love it. And everyone can do it, go and take a walk outside, down by the coast and see where you can see, I mean, it’s just, it’s just a win, win. I love, I love it, citizen science. Just feels

Speaker 1 30:00
like a real achievement when you’ve done something like that, even if say like a half an hour survey.

Anna Bunney 30:05
Yeah, thank you for coming in today. It’s been fascinating talking to you. Thank you. Thank you.

So we’re going to take a quick break now, which is the perfect time for you to whip out your mobile phone and follow us on Tiktok and Instagram. You can find us at oceans pod, and over there, we’ve been posting loads of photos and videos from our guests this series. Don’t forget that this series, we’re also offering listeners access to some very special bonus content. If you want to get an exclusive look behind the scenes, head over to action.greenpeace.org.uk forward slash oceans. Dash podcast. This podcast doesn’t just explore our blue planet’s breathtaking beauty, but also exposes the dangers that threatens it. To find out more about Greenpeace’s work to protect the oceans and how you can support go to greenpeace.org, forward slash oceans.

Before we speak to our next guest, I want to tell you about an experience I had with dolphins off the Cornish coast where I live. I remember a couple of years ago, I was out on Padstow sea life safaris was actually taking a group out with me to go and photograph and film them, and the sea was completely flat and still, which is it’s not typically what you expect with the North Cold War coast, but it was crystal clear, completely still. You could see for miles. And as we went out on the rib, we saw a pod of dolphins leaping not too far away, and how we actually found them. We could see this big group of gannets, and they were diving into the water. So we sped up on the rib, went over to the dolphins, and it was absolutely incredible, because they all started playing alongside the boat, and there was a mother and a calf. First time I’ve ever seen a mother in a calf, and the calf was tiny, and because it was so silent and still and clear. We were leaning over the bow, and we could hear them making the clicks and the whistles to each other. And I’ve actually got, I’ve actually got about 20 videos of it on my phone still, but to be able to hear them communicating to one another in the pod as they were playing alongside of the boat. It was extraordinary. I’ll never forget it.

Up next, we’re hearing from Dr Sarah sharp, an animal rescue vet with years of experience responding to 1000s of stranded marine mammals from providing crucial medical care to dolphins, whales and seals, she’s also played a key role in giving these animals a better chance of survival after their release. Here she is to share her incredible journey and the vital work she’s doing to protect marine life.

Sarah Sharp 33:16
So my name is Dr Sarah sharp, and I’m the veterinarian for ifas marine mammal rescue team on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. So I think I was probably about five years old when I told my mom I wanted to be a dolphin vet. And she said, that’s nice, honey. And kind of continued to go on her way. And so it was always kind of there in the back of my mind. I was always, like, fascinated by dolphins and really wanted to have some kind of something to do with them. When I was a kid, I, you know, I wanted to just interact with them. That’s all I wanted to do. And then as I kind of grew up, went to college, I wanted to be able to help them somehow in the wild, like, how can I help them? How can I interact with them? And I still have this interest in in veterinary medicine, and how could those two kind of interact there was, unfortunately, a really bad oil spill in our area, and a lot of marine birds were impacted, and I met an amazing Indian veterinarian who was helping all these aquatic birds. That was really where it kind of fell. The pieces kind of clicked and came together where I felt like, wow, I could really, actually impact wild dolphin populations and potentially still be doing some veterinary medicine along along with it. So that’s kind of where my my interest in veterinary medicine and marine conservation came together and started doing stranding work. And I was just hooked. It was, it was the coolest thing that I could imagine doing. And we just had this direct impact on saving animals lives and sending them back into the wild. And it was, there was really no going back for me at that point. So we respond to stranded dolphins, whales and seals on Cape Cod, which is one of the busiest places in the world for marine mammal strandings, and specifically dolphin strandings. So we never really know what our day is going to look like, but oftentimes it will start with an early morning call to our stranding hotline that’s manned 24 hours a day, and it’s the general public reporting that they’ve been. Walking on the beach somewhere and found a dolphin that stranded ashore. Our team springs to action immediately, and we get out the door as fast as we can. And so in order to have the fastest response possible, we have volunteers that are stationed all throughout our coverage area. And so those volunteers are the first ones on scene, and they get there and kind of care for the animal until our team can get on scene with all of our special equipment. When, when we do a live on scene for a dolphin stranding, we bring the animal into our mobile dolphin rescue vehicle. So we lovingly call it Moby, and so it’s a this big white truck that we can fit up to nine dolphins in. So we often get strandings where there’s multiple animals involved, and so we bring the animal in. There’s nice, soft cushioning there. We try to keep the lights and the noise low, to keep the animal as calm as possible. We start right away by doing an assessment of shock for the animal to see how the animal is doing, how stable it is. But in general, once we get the animal into our rescue vehicle, it takes about 45 minutes to an hour to transport them to the release site, and we can get all of our diagnostics and treatments done in that time. So it is pretty fast once we’re on scene, once we get the animal out of the little troublesome area they’ve gotten into, then it’s a pretty fast turnaround to get them back in the water. We do move as fast as we can, as safely as we can, because we know that every minute really counts for these animals. The longer they’re out of the water, the harder it is on their body, and that’s part of the reason we’re doing those treatments as we’re transporting we’re trying to counteract some of those negative effects of being on land. So when I started in the early, I guess early, 2000s responding to strandings, we were taught as incoming stranding biologists that single dolphins, they’re social species. So it was believed, at the time that they were stranding for a reason, that they they have to be sick or injured, so that they were pretty much automatically euthanized. At the same time, we were starting to develop our mass stranding response protocols, so we were starting to actually provide a health assessment for mass stranded dolphins. And so we went through this rhetoric with each animal and evaluated how healthy they were when they stranded. And so when we then would get single stranded animals, we started putting them through that same kind of rhetoric, that same health assessment, and they were coming back as healthy. And so this idea clicked in my mind of, well, if that animal is coming back as healthy, if it were in a mass stranding, we would have just released that animal. So why are we doing it differently with single animals? And the stranding event that really got me thinking about this was we had a single dolphin. It stranded on the beach. I went according to the protocol, and I euthanized that animal. And then probably about five minutes after I euthanized that animal, five other dolphins stranded in the same area, and so we hadn’t seen them there before. We didn’t know that they were there. And so it broke my heart that I that I had to euthanize that animal because we thought it was by itself. And so my approach was, there’s a lot that’s going on that we don’t know about. All we can do is assess each animal individually, and if they’re healthy, let’s give them a shot. And so we got funding and support to be able to do that and attach satellite tags to those single dolphins, relocate them, release them, and see if they would survive after release, just as we had done with the mass stranded dolphins. And amazingly, we did find that if they were healthy, even if they stranded by themselves, even if we released them by themselves, they survived. And one of the coolest things was, because of those satellite tags, they also had a radio transmission frequency, and so we were able to go on vessels days after we’d released them and actually visually find them again. And we saw that those animals were actually back in groups. So one of the big reasons people thought, oh, you can’t release it by itself. It’ll never survive. It’ll never find cons specifics or other dolphins of the same species. You’re just dooming that animal to a horrible end and a horrible suffering. And so seeing these single animals we release back with big groups of delis swing and doing normal dolphin things was probably one of the coolest things that we’ve ever been able to do. And so now, because of that, and we published a study on it, showing that these animals that are healthy, even if they stray by themselves, can be released and can find groups of other dolphins. And now the protocol for that has changed, and we do evaluate every individual, individually and say, Are you healthy enough or not? The satellite tags that we attach to the dolphins, we attach them with a single pin that goes through the trailing edge of the dorsal fin, so that’s the end kind of towards their tail, and so it goes in about an inch or so in from that trailing edge. And it’s essentially like an ear piercing for them. The tags transmit to a satellite and give us the location of the animal, so we can track them remotely from land, and we’ll see where the animal goes. Some of the tags also have dive data, so you can see how they’re diving and what that profile looks like. To see if that looks normal, but we’re able to track these animals, and what we found is we’re looking primarily. We’re looking for survival, and so what we want to see is. In common dolphins is for them to survive at least 21 days after release. In bigger species with bigger dorsal fans, we look for about a month, and so as long as those satellite tags transmit and they’re going to good places that are normal dolphin habitat, then that we can consider that animal a successful release. After a couple months, that tag falls off, and the dolphin is pretty much no worse for the wear with those tags, it’s incredible the amount of data that we get. We don’t satellite tag every dolphin, but we satellite tag right now, we’re tagging the dolphins that fall within our borderline category. So we’ve got dolphins that are very clearly healthy release candidates. We’ve got dolphins that are very sick and can’t be immediately released. And then we’ve got this grey area in the middle where dolphins are just we’re not sure. We’re not 100% sure. We think it’s about 5050 whether they can be released and survive or not. And so those are the animals that we’re satellite tagging. Now the project we’ve been working on recently is we have a dolphin rescue centre, so we’re doing short term rehabilitation for up to four days. And I think I was a veterinary the team for a number of years before we started this project. But it was, it was devised with the idea that there are these animals, these borderline cases, who may or may not be healthy, that we really feel like we could do more for. That was a situation where we sat down as a team and said, This is really something where we can improve the lives of these animals and hopefully improve their chance of survival after release, and if not, at least we’ll get more information and be able to make better decisions in the future. And so I think starting that programme was kind of a more recent experience where it felt like we really have this opportunity to do this amazing thing and to help more animals. And so that’s been a journey and exciting process for us more recently. So I think the difference between the early days of stranding response and now is I do feel like we have, we have a lot more protocols in place. We’re a lot more methodical. Well, again, we were doing the best that we could by could back then. I do feel like there was a lot of okay, how do we do this? We’ve never seen this before, and so as our agency and our team has kind of been around and has done this a lot, we really have our protocols set up and our systems set up where everything runs like clockwork. Now we’ve gotten to an amazing point in our team is incredible. Our volunteers are some of the most experienced dolphin stranding responders on the planet. I mean, a number of animals they’ve responded to just blows my mind. And they’re all amazing, well trained, professional responders. It’s a pleasure to be able to work with all of them and to be able to do what our team does, because because we do it so often, there are lots of reasons why marine mammals strand the majority of animals, the dolphins that strand on Cape Cod, are just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but they can be impacted by other things going on in the marine environment. Cetaceans. So dolphins, whales, porpoises, can be hit by vessels. It’s more common in large whales, than it is in dolphins, but it certainly happens, I would say more so with the coastal dolphin species that we see in other areas, where there’s just a lot of boats running around near shore, and that results in when the dolphins are near shore as well. That results in in vessel collisions for them, which are oftentimes fatal. We’ve been responding to the highest number of dolphin strandings that we’ve ever responded to, about eight times what we normally respond to for live dolphins. Rye has been so busy this past year, we have some theories, but we need to do a little bit more research and talk to some colleagues about it. The fishermen and Whale Watch boats were anecdotally saying there’s a lot of prey bait fish in near shore, so that might be correlated with climate change and shifting temperatures in the ocean, shifting pre distributions. The Gulf of Maine, which is the body of water Cape Cod Bay, is adjacent to, is the fastest warming body of water on the planet. So we know that things are changing a lot out there. We’re hoping that this doesn’t mean it’s going to continue, because it’s been a brutal year for our team, but we’re keeping an eye on it, and we’ll try to figure out if that really is what was the cause. In order to help preserve the future of dolphins, certainly standing up for protections in your own country that will help protect these animals is really, really important. So the Marine Mammal Protection Act in the US is recently been coming under threat. These are really important regulations that help these animals continue to be able to live these lives without entirely being at the mercy of human whims. And so supporting those regulations that protect dolphins in the wild, supporting companies that are doing responsible shipping and other responsible practices, are things that everybody can do to help ensure that these animals live, live long, happy, wild lives. I am optimistic, and I am hopeful that we as a human species will be able to find a way to coexist peacefully with these animals, to allow them the space to swim and to to live lives as unhindered by. Human activities as possible, we are going to, kind of have to co evolve together to be able to make that possible. Dolphins will have to figure some things out, as well as will humans. And so I think it’s, I am hopeful that we will be able to come to a place where dolphins can live their free, wild lives out in the oceans, and humans can live happy, good, quality lives without killing them in our nets and running them over with our vessels. Just hope for them to have a long, wild future ahead.

Anna Bunney 45:36
We’ve learned so much today about these extraordinary animals and the challenges they’re facing. If you enjoyed today’s episode, make sure you hit that subscribe or follow button, because next week, we’re diving into the secret life of sea turtles with even more incredible facts and real life stories from the dedicated people working to protect them. And

Nathan Robinson 45:58
it’s just this monstrous but beautiful ancient thing sitting in a wooden pallet so completely out of its normal habitat, and we had to hang onto it for the evening. I pulled out this object I realised that it wasn’t organic. It was a plastic straw,

Eirini Kasimati 46:15
and that’s how people citizens found him stranded on a beach in Preveza. What I always say is like every sea turtle, every turtle patient that is coming here has its own unique story.

Anna Bunney 46:38
This episode was brought to you by Greenpeace and crowd network. It is hosted by me, wildlife filmmaker and broadcaster Hannah stitful. It is produced by Vicki Wright, Catalina Noguera, Robert Wallace, George Sampson, Kate Stevens, Steve Jones and Christina irivnak. Sound design is by Crawford Blair. The music we use is from our partners, BMG Production Music. The team at Greenpeace is James Hansen, Alex shallot, Jenae Mayer, Marta of charik Flora have Becky Malone and Alice Lloyd Hunter. Archive, courtesy of Greenpeace. Thanks for listening. See you next week. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai