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“New” sightings report from 2001!

Unusually we have just added a new report to the Dony Location / Sightings page – for 2001! This is thanks to a persistent piece of detective work by Gauthier Chapelle in Brussels. Following the progress of Dony along the coast of southern Brittany during the last few months, Gauthier was in regular contact with Sophie Leclerf who lives in the area and has supplied many valuable reports. She mentioned to Gauthier that with other members of her dive club she had also been swimming with a friendly dolphin back in the same area (Beg Meil) back in September 2001. Having met Dony this year, all the divers were unanimous in their opinion that it was a different dolphin – a bigger one, in fact! Could it have been Jean Floch, the ‘other’ solitary Brittany dolphin who has been living around Brezellec/Cap Sizun since March 2003? Or a third dolphin? Gauthier however looked carefully at the photographs Sophie kindly supplied from September 2001 and decided that it certainly was Dony, whatever the eye witnesses thought. Sophie re-scanned the photos and enlarged them, and by detailed comparison with photos I had taken in the Blasket Island in June 2001, Gauthier has now convinced us as well. Note particularly the scars to the right of and behind Dony’s blowhole, which have partially healed and been overlain by new scars but are still clearly in the same place. And the trailing edge of the dorsal fin – the feature which confirmed our own discovery in May 2002 that Dony, Georges and Randy were all the same dolphin – is also identical, even if a bit blurred in the photo.

This sightings record fits neatly in both time and place between the other sightings we have for this period, as you can see on our Location / Sightings page for Dony. Dony appears to have visited Beg-Meil on his way up from the L’île de Yeu area to the Normandy coast where he spent the winter of 2001/02, and now he is revisiting the same area.

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This story illustrates several interesting points. There are many gaps in our records of Dony and his travels around Europe, and yet with the way he is, many people must have seen him during those ‘missing’ days and weeks. Hopefully in time more will come forward and help us to maintain and publish a more complete account of this amazing dolphin. It is very encouraging that this can still happen nearly two years after the event. Secondly, the photographic documentation of a known wild dolphin at known time intervals, which we are placing in the public domain, should be very useful in providing information on the rates of healing of various scars in dolphin skin, and could in turn make future assessments of dolphin IDs and ages more reliable. Any marine biologists out there who would like a nice project, with some useful data to start you off?! Finally, even eye witnesses can be misled; we need to notice specific features such as nicks and scars rather than trusting to our memories of an overall impression.
Date Posted: 19/07/2003
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