Sharks may be dominating your TV with Discovery’s “Shark Week,” but that dorsal fin sighting on the Chesapeake Bay likely belongs to another marine animal.
Of course, you may see some sharks in the Chesapeake or surrounding rivers; but if you spot a fin, it’s more likely to be a curious bottlenose dolphin.
“In the past couple of years, we’ve noticed that dolphins are traveling very far up river, and that’s in a variety of different tributaries,” said Jamie Testa, with Chesapeake Dolphin Watch, a project of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science that has been around for five years and allows the public to record their dolphin sighting.
Boaters and beachgoers have recorded bottlenoses on the organization’s app from the Patuxent River, Rappahannock River, the Choptank River on the Eastern Shore, and the Chester River.
“Generally, they’re here, foraging in the bay and the rivers. When the food is plentiful, they could just be following it,” said Testa. “They also are rearing their young,” she added, pointing to low levels of predators in the bay and the region’s rivers.
Testa even said a sighting in the Pamunkey River in Virginia was about 30 miles inland from the bay.
The increase in sighting over the past few years is good news for the bottlenoses of the Chesapeake, after their population started dying off about a decade ago.
“They determined it was from a virus that naturally occurs in the population,” she said.
While the increased sightings is also good news for the dolphin population, it could also help scientists better determine the overall health of the Chesapeake.
“Are we seeing an increase in fish availability, forage fish availability? How are the sea grasses doing? What’s water quality like?” said Testa. “I think, as we continue to collect some of this information about dolphins, we’re hoping to integrate it into the larger picture of Chesapeake Bay science and conservation.”
If you want to see dolphins in the bay, they will be in the mid-Bay area until early October, when they will move to the Atlantic for winter.
