Orange County Volunteers Show That Dolphins Count

Third-grader Margaret Herman, the collar on her coat pulled tight against the stiff breeze, was not sure why she had to spend her Saturday staring at the choppy Pacific from the Newport Pier.

But her father knew, even if it would be years before she would appreciate it.

“I want her to be able to walk out here someday and tell her children that there are still dolphins in the ocean,” Michael Herman said. “But to make it happen, I’ve got to do my share.”

Herman was among 40 Orange Coast College students and volunteers who fanned out along the Orange County coast Saturday to look for bottlenose dolphins. In teams of two and three, the dolphin watchers stood on piers and bluff tops and jetties from San Clemente to Bolsa Chica State Beach hoping to spy the playful marine mammals.

Scientists say it was the first attempt at a mass sighting of dolphins off Southern California, a prime playground for the species. The purpose was to get a better handle on the size of the local dolphin population and its range.

Three Pods Spotted

During the two-hour exercise, three pods of dolphins were spotted with an estimated 40 to 50 animals, Orange Coast marine biologist Dennis Kelly said. The largest group was less than a mile offshore near Golden West Street and Pacific Coast Highway in Huntington Beach, one of the few areas along the coast where dolphins have been observed resting for long periods and giving birth to young, said Kelly, who organized Saturday’s sighting.

“I am elated,” Kelly said later in the day. “In 10 years of research, this is the most pods we have identified in a single day.”

Kelly, project director of the nonprofit Coastal Dolphin Survey Project, said Saturday was a “trial run” for what he hopes will be a massive sighting, stretching from the Mexican border to Santa Barbara sometime next summer. He envisions volunteers, like on Saturday, positioned about a mile apart, using binoculars and telescopes to spot and record the dolphins’ movements, behavior and size.

The observations, Kelly said, would be catalogued and studied to better understand the species’ chances of survival in the crowded coastal waters.

Despite the obvious limitations of trying to spot the grayish-colored animals from land, Kelly and others say it may be the most cost-effective way to estimate their numbers. Aerial surveys are difficult because the aircraft travels too fast over the dolphins for an accurate count. And getting enough boats in the water at the same time to conduct a census is too expensive for most oceanographic groups and research units.

“At some point, Kelly’s land-base sightings may become the base line for future decisions about the bottlenose dolphin,” said Doug DeMaster, a marine mammal expert at the federal government’s Southwest Fisheries Center in La Jolla. “It is an important step in learning why this species has been able to adapt to man’s increasing presence.”

The technique, DeMaster said, has been used to count killer whales in Prince William Sound in Alaska and migrating gray whales in the Santa Barbara-Channel Islands area.

Kelly, who has studied dolphins for nearly a decade, estimates that more than 600 dolphins may frequent the waters from San Diego to Santa Barbara, including 130 who are believed to live permanently off the Orange County shore.

Kelly and several San Diego biologists have even complied a “mug book” of 350 individual animals, identified by nicks, cuts and notches on their distinguishing back dorsal fin.

Initially, scientists believed dolphins seen along the coast were simply passing through on their way somewhere else. Research, however, now suggests the dolphins are really homebodies, whose range is often quite small.