Second week in Porto

The day João and Paulo left, the new volunteer arrived. Telma Pereira is the third volunteer to come through Vertigem and came to stay for two weeks. As we went back to the marina we talked about several aspects of the project, and about how the daily routine would be like. During this second week, we received several guests on board to see what the work consisted about. These guests came after a formal invitation I made to researchers in the lab where I worked before starting this project (CIBIO), which, to my surprise, resulted in several interested people wanting to come on board. Until the new stable volunteers arrived two days later, we were able to carry our work using solely these guests. On the first day Ana Mendonça came back on board for a days fieldwork, bringing a friend with her, meaning we would have 4 people on board.

Telma Pereira

Ana and her guest

The sea was relatively quiet that day, but dolphins were not collaborating. Once we found them, me and Ana got into the dingy but didn't get any chance to sample. We did collect a sample though, but from a dead common dolphin we found floating.

We might be tempted to determine the cause of death of the animal, but the truth is, besides being very difficult to determine exactly what the cause of death was, the hypothesis most likely to be true is pretty much irrelevant. Dolphins, like any other animal, eventually die from a number of natural causes, and when they do they tend to float for several days until decomposition causes them to sink. That is also the reason why it is important to collect biopsy samples from live animals rather than rely on strandings solely. However, if integrated with biopsy samples, a stranded animal might be valuable, reason why we collected a sample from the dead animal. So although the day was not perfect, we still managed to collect a sample!

Eventually the wind got stronger and we had to get back. Fortunately, the fact that there's wind means we can come back sailing and save fuel. As were coming back, we had a very interesting conversation about science and the future of population genetic analysis!

On the next day Miguel Fonseca joined us as a guest. However, given we were only three on board, Miguel would had to work as well. He wasn't too concerned about it though, and soon we were both in the dingy sampling some dolphins.Fortunately, and to contrast with the last few days, we got 3 samples. Not bad! Again, as we were coming back, the conversation subject was again science but this time on the new challenges that researchers are facing with phylogenetic inference, and what they are doing to deal with it!

Then, we finally received the new volunteers, the second round of international crew. They would be staying for a week. Their first task however, was not dolphin related but involved sewing a piece of the mainsail that had ripped. Fortunately, the week before I was able to get some repairing material from Pires de Lima, a Portuguese sailmaker who also made the sails on this boat. He was kind enough to give me some spares he had that allowed me to repair it. We did it very effectively though, we did it quickly and the next days of sailing confirmed the solidity of the repair. So, two new flags need to be hoisted on our blog!

Sampling, however was tough. In spite of our best efforts, strong winds and the elusive behaviour of the animals stopped us from getting a satisfactory number of samples. Not bad, by all means, but still a bit lower than we would have liked. A variety of different guests joined us. The first, Ana Rocha, a sailing teacher that was getting ready to apply for a masters degree, contacted me seeking some advice on how to get into research on cetaceans. I told her to come on board for a day and see how the routine was and exchange some ideas. I think she enjoyed the day, and I hope our advices were useful. On another day we had Sónia Ferreira on board, a researcher from CIBIO working on insects,which means this was a quite different day for her. The day wasn't optimal though, and we had to face some quite strong winds. Sara Rocha, another researcher from CIBIO, this time working on lizard population genetics in the island of the Indian Ocean,came along with her brother, André. They did see some dolphins, but again the strong winds made it a short day. They did sail quite a bit though! Finally, Dr.Luzia Sousa, the curator from the Natural History Museum of the Porto Faculty of Sciences joined us for a day. I was glad to hear that she had enjoyed her day very much, and that she was very pleased with the contact when was able to have with dolphins and their unique behaviour.

At the end of the week, we had collected 11 samples from wild dolphins in Porto plus 1 from the dead animal. Not ideal but not bad given this was the first time anyone was studying wild dolphins in this region. We still had a few days until the arrival of the new crew were we could try and get more samples, but weather was unstable and it was hard to predict if we could do any sampling. We would soon have to move the the next sampling location, Figueira-da-Foz, because time is limited, and we need to get samples from other regions of the country, not only Porto.