Dolphin Watch
Return of the queen
By ANN WEAVER
| Article published on Thursday, Jan. 15, 2009 |
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![[Image]](/content_images/011509_out-01.jpg) |
| Photo by ANN WEAVER |
| P is a local bottlenose dolphin with many remarkable things to say. Here she uses body language to say “Hello again!” after returning from a four-month absence. |
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There she was. Out of the blue. Like she’d never left. Queen P had returned.
P is a special dolphin. She’s among a handful of the 180 John’s Pass dolphins who ‘talks’ to us through behavior. She has remarkable things to say.
Take that numbingly cold day we broke our survey routine to stop for coffee at a seaside MacDonald’s. P followed us there like she knew we were doing something unusual.
P knows how to get our attention. Many times, when we’re ending an observation of her by slowly cruising away, she starts wildly breaching or whipping objects over the sea surface as if she knows perfectly well that this will draw us back to her.
We interpret her behavior this way because dolphins are free to stay near the research boat or vanish. After her sudden aerial episodes, P comes over and stays near like that was the point of her display.
She’s dropped off both of her babies at our boat so we can babysit and she can hunt in peace. Then she’ll return, pick up the baby with cetacean nonchalance and off they go.
She insinuates high social status in several ways, a formal way of saying she’s self-confident. She doesn’t change her behavior around other dolphins, even dolphins who are strange [to us]. She’s particularly picky about her companions. Her body is fairly free of scars, something that any dolphin with half a social life is hard-pressed to accomplish.
Her son PC, born in 2005, weaned at the extraordinarily early age of 15 months. He’s gone on to make good, growing big for his age and dealing with other, often larger, dolphins with his mother’s certainty of attitude.
All in all, P is really remarkable.
So when she disappeared in September, taking her new calf Peewee with her, I missed seeing them. And I admittedly went a little crazy when I saw them last Friday and again on Sunday. It wasn’t like P to vanish for four months because she is a resident dolphin.
John’s Pass dolphins are classed as residents and non-residents based on their frequency of occurrence in the study area. Resident dolphins are here at least three out of four seasons of the year. Non-residents are here less frequently. Residency patterns are part of our analysis of dolphin behavior in conjunction with the coastal construction activities at John’s Pass. If construction chases residents away, it’s not clear other dolphins will automatically move in or establish a stable community.
But studying dolphin residency patterns can make you crazy. Take P’s disappearance. We saw her regularly all this year but especially from March through July. We saw her the entire month of May, just before she had Peewee in early June. We found them regularly in August and September. But then for some frustratingly unknown reason, they vanished on September 21st.
Where did she go? Why did she go?
So I wasn’t expecting to see her last Friday when, midway through the survey, the distant waters were broken by a brief skirmish between a large and small dolphin. Perhaps it was a domestic issue; mother dolphins discipline calf misbehavior. In any case, it was quickly settled.
The two dolphins approached me as I slowly approached them. The adult cruised right over. It was P! The queen had returned!
For science sake, I focused on P. We take pictures of dolphins to document their occurrence and identify individuals. Mothers have identifying body marks; calves rarely do. Alas! The tiny gray body that rocketed around the boat was very distracting! Unfortunately, P’s calf Peewee had developed another distracting behavior, an interest in outboard engines we call ‘snorting the engine’. Whenever Peewee zoomed up to the propeller, I of course took the engine out of gear.
With her signature certainty, P kept going. That left me behind with Peewee.
Wasn’t that just like P! Although it’d been four months since she’d seen our boat, she recognized it immediately, knew she’d found a babysitter for little Peewee and capitalized on it. P hunted in the shallows. Peewee zoomed around the boat and played with little leaves. I engaged in the pointless pastime of trying to get pictures of a fast-moving calf!
When I left to continue the survey, I left regrettably.
So you can’t blame me for going a little crazy when we launched the boat Sunday and found P with a contingent of familiar friends fifty yards away.
They’d been hovering around Dolphin Quest, piloted by the capable and dolphin-careful Captain Larry Carnes, but sped over to us. “There’s DD1! There’s her calf Doodle with Peewee! There’s DD2! He’s a bull!,” I shouted to friend Jen Noble, producer of the popular TV series A Gulf Coast Journal. She’d been to sea with me before. As before, the dolphins were there to captivate.
They swirled around, peering up at us. We leaned over, peering down at them. That didn’t cut it for P. She suddenly launched herself skyward once, twice, by way of greeting. “Salute to you too, lady!!” And as she’s wont to do, P and her friends came over and stayed after her aerial display like that was the whole point.
No wonder Captain John Heidemann thinks we ought to call this remarkable individual “Queen P”. That’s certainly who she is.
Dr. Weaver studies wild dolphins under federal permit GA1088-1815, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Send her an e-mail at dazzled@tampabay.rr.com or visit www.dazzlingdolphins.com.
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Article published on Thursday, Jan. 15, 2009
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