Our ongoing field research here at Papua Paradise / Raja Ampat has been very successful so far, almost every time we go out with the boat we find Whales and Dolphins. We use our eyes and a hydrophone to locate them and most often we will hear the Spinner Dolphins. There are many Spinner Dolphins in the area and one day we found a large group of over 1000 of them! They do acrobatic spins and like to bow ride with the boat and they vocalize a lot, which makes it easy to identify and locate them. We also see Brydes whales on a regular basis, but their sounds are of very low frequency and often hard to make out against background noise, however when they dive they arch their backs and that is easy to spot even from a distance.

We could identify a local group of Bottlenose dolphins, which frequent the area around Papua Paradise Resort and are seen on a regular basis even from the bungalows.
We will continue our work until the 5th of March and are excited every day about what we will meet in these beautiful waters.

More news to follow!

Heike & Patrick
Ocean Sounds Research Team

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