Yesterday was a very eventful day on the pier here in New Quay. The morning weather was grey and rainy and the fog laid thick across the horizon, but the dolphins didn´t seem to mind. A group of four dolphins where leaping and swimming in circles just by the cardinal buoy outside New Quay Harbour. They were feeding using a technique called herding where a group of dolphins will surround a school of fish to pack them as tightly as possible. When they have succeeded they will take turns feeding on the school. Above the water you can usually only see the dolphins swimming back and forth splashing around.
(C) Emilia Benavente/Sea Watch Foundation
We could identify two of the dolphins with our photo-identification catalogue. One was Bond, one of our adoptable dolphins and the other one was Lumpy, the calf to Smoothy (another adoptable dolphin) that was born in 2006. The other dolphins in this encounter didn´t have marked dorsal fins so we cannot identify them.
8 year old dolphin Lumpy.
(C) Emilia Benavente/Sea Watch Foundation
