Today was a shark fishing day. We put the Cuvier in the water at 6:45 and set ten lines (in about 40 ft of water) with snapper frames (carcasses of pink snapper with the fillet removed) and then we came in for breakfast. On shark fishing days the lines need to be checked every two hours, and today we had leisurely time on the water between our 10, 12, 2 and 4:00 line checks.
During our first break we went to visit the pearl farm. From afar, it looks like it is a building on the beach, but the pearl farm processing building and shop is floating on the bay.
It is a family run business.
One of their specialties is embedding an opal in an oyster and having the pearl grow around it. They were beautiful, but super expensive.
During our second and third break, we cruised the sea grass meadows until we found a lucky spot, then we put down the anchor and fished and relaxed. We had a few hand lines and one rod and reel.
We caught nothing on the hand lines, but both Sean and Greg caught a few pike (long fin pike?) Got a few nibbles with my hand line and rubber lure. Cindy put a piece of Taylor fin on her line, and attracted a lot of butter fish.
The water was extremely clear and glassy, and at one point Cindy noticed something strange in the water. It was a pair of small shovel nose rays, one smaller and lighter in color than the other. What was unusual about these rays (we see shovel nose rays almost every day) was that they seemed to be wedged together, the smaller one tucked in to the larger one, so that when they swam (about every 10 minutes they moved about 5 meters, they moved in synch, like they were one organism.
Today I got to to every part of shark fishing (except handling a shark, because we did not catch one) including driving the boat both at speed, to check the lines and to pull up the equipment at the end of the day. (Before Cindy had only had me drive the boat when we were cruising slowly along transect lines)
In the evening we went to see Richard Connor speak on dolphin politics. His talk was fascinating! He studies the alliances between male dolphins and has been coming to Monkey Mia for over twenty years, since he was an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz and there was practically nothing up here. There are some individual dolphins up here that have been part of his studies the whole time (including Bly who was found dead a few days ago).
Some of the main/interesting points that he made: humans and dolphins (and elephants) have large brains and also have complex social structures, we need to depend on individuals with whom we are in competition with to reproduce. The male dolphins establish long term alliances in both small groups (2-3 individuals) and large groups (14 -40 I think he said). The groups last years, but are fluid, individuals can come and go.Individual dolphins have individual specialties and skills when it comes to foraging and the females can teach these skills to their offspring. He explained how hard it is to study dolphin communication since there is so much of it going on and underwater it is hard to tell which sounds are coming from which animal. At the end of the talk he explained a “dolphin soap opera”, diagramming how the small alliances have changed (who's been hanging with whom) over twenty years. It reminded me of middle school social dynamics, with one individual always being the one to be excluded and a few others always being the popular dolphins. He obviously loves his work, and I see why everyone around here has so much respect and fondness for him.
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