Tara Thean, a biology major at Princeton University, writes from Sarasota Bay, Fla., where she is studying signature whistle development in wild bottlenose dolphins.
Saturday, May 12
Instead of spending the morning loading equipment onto boats and conceptualizing our follow strategy for the day, we spent it cleaning our motel rooms and preparing to leave. We enjoyed winding down at the farewell barbecue last night. The weather was perfect for a cookout: warm and slightly breezy. I particularly enjoyed eating my first hot meal in five days: two burgers and a hot dog. Our packed lunches on the boat had to be portable, sturdy and compact, which means our lunchboxes were filled with sandwiches and cereal bars. By dinnertime, I was always so exhausted that I couldn?t bring myself to eat more than cereal and milk.
After we had settled down with food, our program director, Randall Wells, gave us a final debriefing about the week?s work. I was happy to hear that we had sampled and examined 16 dolphins in this round of fieldwork ? in a typical field week, we find 10 to 15. Of these 16, four were high-priority animals that we had previously not had a chance to look at: FB274, FB233, FB276 and Boomer. I also found out that one of the dolphins we had thought was female was actually male ? thankfully, he had been given the versatile name Pat.
But even in the revelry of the farewell party, we had work left to do. In the evening, my supervisor, Laela Sayigh, and I hosed down the field gear for storage over the next few months and organized equipment back at the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program base.
Today, I will board a plane to go to Oxford University to finish my term abroad, armed with the skills I have gained from my stint with a professional scientific society. In June, I head to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution under a generous fellowship, where I will use the data from this trip as well as previous data from the Sarasota dolphin whistle database to better understand whistle copying in bottlenose dolphin calves. I also hope to participate in another field session in Sarasota Bay with the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program.
There is a lot about the field that I will miss when I get back to Oxford: the front-seat view of the dolphins I am studying, the warm Florida weather and especially the camaraderie I developed with my teammates. I was rather starstruck when I first arrived in Sarasota; many of the field scientists I met on my first day are the authors of papers I have been reading at university all year. As I read those papers, I would never have guessed that I would soon sit on a boat with the authors talking about current research and how our findings of the day fit in with previous work.
One of the most interesting conversations I had was with a marine acoustics specialist, Vincent Janik, about a debate he was involved in some years ago about whether signature whistles actually exist. Two other biologists had proposed that signature whistles were a fallacy. They claimed that dolphins share one predominant whistle type, with some individual differences when the dolphins are in isolation, as opposed to each individual dolphin having its own distinctive whistle. They also suggested that previous work on these whistles used biased data and inferior whistle classification techniques. Vincent and his colleagues re-evaluated the vocalizations of several Sarasota Bay dolphins and confirmed that signature whistles are, in fact, present in these animals? vocal repertory. After examining the literature and existing data, I am convinced of the same.
But not all the conversations I have had are with biologists or vets. There are many people on this trip whose day jobs are entirely separate from their work in Sarasota. James Thorson, for example, works as a lawyer when he isn?t volunteering with dolphin research projects in Sarasota, Argentina or Brazil. Encountering people like James showed me that anyone can be a natural scientist, no matter what their background, simply by paying attention to detail, being persistent and working well with others. And a little intellectual curiosity goes a long way ? the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program wouldn?t exist if Blair Irvine and Randall Wells,?then a high school student, hadn?t wondered over 40 years ago whether the dolphins they saw in Sarasota Bay lived there all year round. We can forever be students of the natural laboratory around us if we choose to be, and are lucky to have such a rich tapestry of life and nature almost anywhere we look.
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