Looking down the barrel of a telephoto lens, Dr Elizabeth Hawkins tells the dolphins circling the research boat to work it for the camera.
“That’s it,” she says, joking to her crew. “Show us some fin. Don’t be shy. How about some tail? Oh that’s good. The camera loves you.”
This is the second pod of the day. It’s made up of 14 dolphins, including three older juveniles – roughly equivalent to the age of a human toddler. Not long before, the boat had come across a pod of 11, including a neonate, or newborn, in human terms.
Photographing the dolphins helps create a visual record that can be later analysed to identify each individual member, says Hawkins, who is the chief executive of Dolphin Research Australia. The dorsal fin acts like a fingerprint thanks to a lifetime collection of notches, nicks and scars.
“Some of these animals I’ve known for over 24 years, so effectively we’ve grown older together, and we’re now similar ages,” Hawkins says. “It’s quite a special relationship.
“It takes a long time to get to understand their ecology but also get to know them as individuals. Just like us, they all have individual personalities.”
These were just one of several encounters for her team – including two separate encounters with some of the first humpback whales of the season – among potentially hundreds from the volunteers who turned out on Saturday morning to take part in New South Wales’ first statewide dolphin census.
Across the state, more than 500 people registered and completed the one-hour training module to count every dolphin they saw for a minimum of 15 minutes. Participants camped at cliff sides and coastal lookouts to gaze at the ocean, fly drones or, in some cases, get out on the water in kayaks or boats.
“The data we will get from this is important,” Hawkins says. “We don’t have good information about the areas that are important to these animals and their health.”
It is thought there are between 400 and 500 dolphins living in the Byron Bay area alone but the number across the entire NSW coastline is not known. Across this vast distance, the most recognised species is the Indo-Pacific bottlenosed dolphin, which forms distinct communities tied to specific areas of coast.
There are also 19 separate dolphin and small whale species found across NSW, many of them seasonal species such as the orca and short-beaked common dolphin that move with their food sources.
What is known about these populations is relatively sparse, a problem Hawkins and ranger Andy Marshall from the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service sought to address when they began organising the dolphin census three years ago.
“The census was really about giving us the knowledge base to make well-informed, well-justified decisions about the populations in these locations,” he says.
Marshall, who was working across seven areas in the mid-north coast for the entire day, says he found dolphins at three sites, including a community of 40 socialising in a bay. It was a good sign, he says, as dolphins prefer spots with good food, calm conditions and clear water.
Dolphins are like the canary in the coalmine, he says. “If there are healthy dolphins, it’s a sign that it’s a healthy place. If they disappear, it’s a sign that something is going wrong.”
Among the risks and threats the dolphins face are emerging diseases, pollution from runoff into river systems, fishing impacts and the existential threat of climate crisis.
“For our Byron dolphins in particular, climate change is going to be one of the biggest influences of change,” Hawkins says. “There are questions about how they are going to adapt to shifts in their environment. Things like current movement, prey movement and prey availability are all going to impact them in a variety of ways.”
The results of the effort, enabled through financial support from the NSW state government under the Marine Estate Management Strategy, will take at least a month to collate.
Hawkins and Marshall say the enthusiastic support from the public speaks to the “innate” connection humans feel towards dolphins, which have long played a significant role within Indigenous coastal communities.
“I think it comes from the recognition that these are high-level social beings, similar to us, with similar social systems to us, similar complexities in decision-making, sometimes in the same social context,” Hawkins says.
“The other thing that gets people is that these animals show curiosity to us … they seem to look back at us sometimes. There’s something there that solidifies that connection.”
With the census expected to be repeated in future years, the hope is that those living along the coast will get to know the dolphins whose home they share, to the point where they may be able to identify each individual.
“To care for these animals, we really need our coastal communities to act as stewards,” Hawkins says. “If we’re not watching how they’re going, we won’t know anything until it’s too late. That’s where these citizen scientist programs can help take care of our dolphins and our oceans.”
