Hundreds Will Assist in Massive Dolphin Count

A low-flying plane, two boats, dozens of lifeguards and more than 100 San Diego County residents are expected to participate July 23 in what organizers call the largest mass sighting of dolphins yet attempted in the United States.

The event, coordinated throughout Southern California by Orange Coast College marine biology Prof. Dennis Kelly and locally by the San Diego chapter of a whale-conservation group, will be the first to use the public along the length of the county’s coastline.

50 Spots About 1 Mile Apart

Volunteers with binoculars will be trained by the American Cetacean Society and stationed for two hours at 50 roughly 1-mile intervals along the coast from Mexico to the Orange County line. From Orange County north to Santa Barbara, at least 150 more watch sites and 300 volunteers will attempt to learn how many bottlenose dolphins inhabit the area and how far they roam.

The San Diego volunteers will feed data on their sightings to Kelly for a scientific paper on the bottlenose population, which is estimated at 300 to 500, Kelly said Tuesday. “Nothing like this has ever been done anywhere in the United States.”

Kelly has organized two mass-sighting days in the past year, but they included only Orange and Los Angeles counties and a single driver going up the San Diego County coast. The driver reported no sightings.

San Diego State University dolphin expert R. H. Defran said he will man one of the boats that will be out from Scripps Pier in La Jolla to Carlsbad to corroborate citizen sightings.

“It’s certainly ambitious, and if they can pull it off, it would be great,” said Defran, noting that some of the cliffs north of Pacific Beach and elsewhere are nearly inaccessible.

Kelly said the information gathered will be especially valuable in the wake of the past year’s more than 600 dolphin deaths off the middle and southern East Coast. The cause of those deaths is still a mystery, Kelly said, but autopsies showed they were triggered in part by depressed immune systems, which he believes may be linked to industrial contaminants in the water.

Scattered dolphin beachings on the West Coast in the past few years have produced some evidence of contamination by the banned pesticide DDT and by the industrial toxins known as PCBs, Kelly said, but there is no reason to conclude that anything on the scale of the Atlantic Coast disaster is imminent.

Some ‘Tough Hombres’ “Bottlenoses are tough hombres, but there’s a certain point you reach when you just overwhelm them, and then they die quick,” Kelly said.

Celia Condit, the local president of the American Cetacean Society, said there has been nothing like the massive Atlantic beachings on the Pacific Coast, “But it’s important that you have the most knowledge before a tragedy like that happens.”

Condit said the overlapping methods of simultaneous dolphin-watching and timed sightings between 10 a.m. and noon will ensure that the same dolphins won’t be counted twice unknowingly. Observers--some in pairs, others in groups--will also keep track of how many are traveling together in each “pod.”

The boats and the plane will take close-up photographs of the dorsal fins to keep track of individual dolphins, she said. The group has also asked regular fishing boats and lifeguards to call in sightings.

Piers, Cliffs, Towers

The shoreline stations include piers, cliff overlooks and lifeguard towers on loan for the event. Robert Clark, treasurer of the Cetacean Society’s 250-member San Diego group, said he is encouraging unofficial participants to join in watching from sites with good visibility, including the Imperial Beach Pier and the Ocean Beach Pier, or to call to find out where recent sightings have been.

Bottlenose dolphins are intelligent, feed on fish and squid and apparently range sporadically from Ensenada to Point Concepcion, said Condit, who works as an education supervisor at Sea World. Bottlenoses make up most dolphin sightings within 500 yards of the shore, but common and Pacific white-sided dolphins also make appearances.