TEAM IV

Team quatro is well under way, and actually more than halfway done now. Time is still going by extremely fast. The good news is that the weather seems to be finally getting straightened out. The August fog has been reduced to little to none, and the days have been consistently amazing. Patterns in the bay have been developing with animals as well as the weather changes. We are seeing an average of about 3-4 humpbacks a day with as many as 9 today. We found a pod of transient orca's with a small calf a few days ago not too far from Moss Landing and we have seen them a few more times from the beach while on otters. Otters have been going well as we have decided to focus on flood tide samplings during team 4. The data has been real consistent and we are getting good results. The 24-hour otter watch which we do once a team has proved to be stretching the staff thin at times... since only Danny, Cyndi, and myself remain after Steph and Andrew left. During the last 24-hour day however, a german production group came to film us as a portion of their otter documentary.. which was interesting to say the least. More on that later.

On the dolphin front, things are heating up again this week. Many animals that we have not seen since last year are returning to the bay, many with neonates at their sides. This is very interesting, as we are finding a lot of our animals that are females. There are at least 15 mother-calf pairs consisting of neonates and yearlings in the bay at this time. One theory we are leaning towards right now is that the bay is a perfect nursery ground for the mother-calf group that we see growing - by the day it seems. We are easily up to about 95 animals identified this season, which is almost exactly half of our master catalog. Also we are in the process of matching with the L.A. catalog to find out where the animals are when not here in the bay. Hopefully, this will help us to get a better understanding of their movements and social structure and continue going forward with the great data we are collecting this season.