Dolphins - How do they socialize?
The average dolphin swims at a rate of between 10 and When dolphins meet, they don’t touch straight away like we do. They circle around each other, they swim side by side, they dive down, they come up, they race along together, they check each other out. Do the same with Dusty and allow yourselves time to get the measure of each other. The first stages in communication without language – whether with small children, with strangers who don’t speak your language or with other species – are often based on miming and on imitating each others’ gestures.

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Other people are already collecting records of cetacean sightings in general in Ireland: the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group maintains it own database and submits summaries to the Sea Watch Foundation in Oxford, England, which collates records on a European basis. They also publish interesting findings in the Irish Naturalists' Journal and in the Wild Ireland magazine.

Our own focus, however, is on those cetaceans which particularly seek out human company. In Irish and European waters at this time, that means in effect bottlenose dolphins. In general these are 'solitary' animals, which are going against the normal pattern of their species by living alone and in a restricted area. Bottlenose dolphins as a rule are highly gregarious and active animals, living in family groups sometimes known as pods and roaming over wide stretches of our coastal waters. Partial exceptions to the latter rule are the resident populations in the Shannon estuary, the Moray Firth in Scotland and Cardigan Bay in Wales, which are seen very regularly within quite tightly defined areas. These may in fact represent remnants of much larger populations that have become confined by human activities to relatively small home ranges, and we have some evidence that also suggests both temporary and permanent movements into and out of the core areas, at least in the case of the Shannon. The gregariousness of bottlenose dolphins, however, remains very much the rule, and they are very rarely seen alone.