Jupiter researcher works to decode dolphin communications and culture

Palm Beach Post News: Jupiter researcher works to decode dolphin communications and culture

A young bottlenose dolphin named Nightmare has become a major player in a dolphin community 40 miles off the Bahamas, challenging dominant male spotted dolphins and "being his little bottlenose, male self," said Denise Herzing, founder and director of the Jupiter-based Wild Dolphin Project.

He is named for his mother, not for his adolescent ways, Herzing said. "When his mother, Natasha, was pregnant with him, she was so big, so huge in the water, we thought she was going to give birth in front of us," Herzing said. "And she was really pissy, like, 'Get this thing out of me, I really want to give birth.' She was a nightmare."

Herzing's education brought her through the Pacific northwest to the Midwest, where in 1993 she received a Ph.D. in behavioral biology and environmental studies from Union Graduate School in Cincinnati. Every summer since 1985, Herzing has cruised to the Bahamas to observe Atlantic spotted dolphins and bottlenose dolphins in their natural habitat, making the Wild Dolphin Project the longest running underwater dolphin research project in the world.

The project is funded by donations and ship passengers, who pay to swim with the dolphins and help with data collection. Most researchers are limited to observing dolphins from the surface or in captivity, but the government of the Bahamas permits the Wild Dolphin Project to work underwater with the dolphins, to film their behaviors and record their sounds.

"Dolphins, as far as we know, are probably even more intelligent than great apes," Herzing said. "I'm really interested in finding out what they do with all that brain power out there in the wild."

She expects that dolphins and whales have their own cultures and pass down information that's unique to a particular group. Her 20-year library of dolphin communications, once decoded, may tell if she is right.

The long-term study also led Herzing's team to discover that hurricanes in 2004 and 2005 caused the loss of 30 percent of the dolphins they had identified.

"The first hurricane in '04 really hovered for quite an extended period of time, so it's very likely they drowned from exhaustion," Herzing said. "This year and maybe a bit of last year were the first years we saw them actually restabilizing their social groups and reproducing again."

Human disasters also threaten dolphin populations. Since oil began surging into the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, 58 dolphins have washed ashore. Fifty-three of them were found dead, three died later and two survived.

"When I see some of the pictures of those animals, one of the species looks like a spinner dolphin," Herzing said. "Spinner dolphins are offshore animals, and for a spinner dolphin to strand is huge, because it means that probably everybody else died in his group. Anybody that washes up on shore is only the tip of the iceberg."