For our last survey day we travel back around Malo Island. We found a group of spinner dolphins but much smaller than yesterday (around 20 of them). Plus, they were resting so only one biopsy was collected. The sea was flat calm so we tried to cover some offshore areas. Unfortunately we didn’t spot anything else despite hearing some whale moans with the hydrophone. After a total of 11 survey days, the outcome of this trip is a bit disappointing. We saw only two confirmed species of dolphins, spinner and spotted dolphin, plus one baleen whale, with a very low encounter rate. The final number of biopsies is only 14, 13 of them being spinner dolphins. Ideally, we should come back to Vanuatu later in order to complete sampling at least for spinners. The first week in Efate was clearly affected by bad weather but in Espiritu Santo, the overall conditions were excellent so no excuse there. Anyway, I’m pretty sure that there is more to Vanuatu’s dolphins than we got to experience. It was interesting though to find no Indo-Pacific bottlenose at all. Being present in the Solomon Islands and New Caledonia, we were expecting to find this coastal species in Vanuatu. They might not be here after all.
We would like to express our gratitude to the skippers and observers who joined us during this expedition: Aimeric, Jino, Rémi, Fabrice and Terry. Thank you so much for your patience and effort to find the dolphins. Thanks also to Marie-France and Loïs at Hibiscus Motel in Santo for the very pleasant stay. Finally, we would like to thank our sponsors for their support. We hope that you enjoyed the blog.
From left to right: Véro, Fabrice, Terry, Marc
