Author: Anna Kusmer / Source: Atlas Obscura
Historically, two dolphin species were abundant in the Northern Adriatic Sea, the narrow body of water nestled between Italy’s boot and the Balkan Peninsula: the bottlenose and the common dolphin. In the 1970s, both species seemed to disappear from the Adriatic.
People thought they were gone for good.“Local elderly people and will tell you, ‘When I was young we used to see them all the time, and then we never saw them anymore,’” says Tilen Genov, a marine biologist with Morigenos – Slovenian Marine Mammal Society, “For a long time people just assumed that they are no longer here.”
When Genov was working on his undergrad degree over a decade ago, he was told there were simply no marine mammals in this part of the sea. Turns out the received wisdom was wrong. So what changed? People such as Genov started looking.
“We spent hours and hours at sea staring into the horizon,” says Genov. The research group sometimes went days without seeing anything. But, “slowly and surely, we started seeing dolphins.”
The research group spent years observing the region’s small population of bottlenose dolphins, as part of their Slovenian Dolphin Project. The bottlenose dolphins appear relatively close to the shores of Slovenia, where they gobble up the sea’s sardines and anchovies, some bottom-dwelling fish, and even the occasional octopus or cuttlefish. Not only are they relatively abundant, after all (Genov estimates at least 100 of them live there), but they also seem to show specific and surprising social patterns.
In a study in the journal Marine Biology, out this week, Genov and his colleagues describe eight years of observations. They focused on a subset of the Northern Adriatic’s population—the 38 animals that they saw enough times be confident that they are permanent “residents.”
They found the dolphins had fairly rigid groups that they moved…
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