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| The spinner dolphins in Lovina (Mustika@JCU) |
BBC Earth correspondent Lesley Evans Ogden interviewed me last December in San Francisco during the 21st Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals. The interview is now at the BBC Earth website here. I copy and paste the part that has my research below, but the article covers many other aspects of whale watching from other researchers, so it's a really good read.
Putu Mustika, an adjunct researcher at James Cook University in Australia, and co-founder of the non-profit Cetacean Sirenia Indonesia, has also been exploring how dolphins react to being closely watched by humans in boats. It is a research area she was alerted to by journalists concerned by the practice of boats chasing dolphins.
For the spinner dolphins she studies in Lovina, North Bali, there is, as yet, no formal protocol for marine mammal watching. As a result, it is not uncommon for there to be more dolphin-watching boats than dolphins.
