Title: A Day in the Life of a Student Researching Dolphins in the Potomac

This story is part of our summer storytelling series, which follows Hoyas’ adventures near and far.

Most days this summer, Kelly Bates (C’26) is scanning the Chesapeake Bay for fins.

With binoculars and sunscreen in tow, the senior hops aboard the Ahoya, Georgetown’s research boat, and observes dolphins swim alongside, nurse their calves and face-plant into the water.

As a research assistant for the Potomac-Chesapeake Dolphin Project, Bates helps a team, led by Professor Janet Mann, better understand bottlenose dolphins, a species prevalent in the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay region.

And even though she sees dolphins nearly every day, Bates still gets a jolt every time.

“Sometimes we’ll see dolphins that are a couple years old; sometimes we’ll see ones that are a couple of days old,” she said. “Everybody on the boat – even Professor Mann, who’s been doing this for 40 years – still gets excited.”

The project combines two of Bates’ passions. She’s a member of Georgetown’s sailing team who grew up on the water and saw bottlenose dolphins in Galveston Bay, Texas. She’s also majoring in environmental biology and was eager to get into the field.

“I didn’t want to sit in a lab and look at cells under a microscope,” she said. “The idea that an undergrad could take the data and support from the lab and conduct their own research project – it sounded pretty exciting to me.”

With a fellowship from the Biology Department, Bates also spends her days sifting through photos from the field to identify dolphins’ characteristics and code the images for a larger database. The photo ID method helps the research team analyze the dolphin population’s structure, abundance, distribution and social behavior. In learning more about dolphins’ biology and behavior, we can help better understand their role in our ecosystems, Bates said.

“The more we know about them, the better job we can do in creating policies and practices that support a healthy and productive environment for all the species in the Potomac-Chesapeake region– humans and dolphins included,” she said.

Learn more about Bates’ work and her typical day living in a cottage in Virginia with fellow research assistants and spotting dolphins.

What does a typical day look like for you?

We wake up between 6:30 a.m. and 7. We eat breakfast, pack a lunch and boat snacks, and gather all our gear. We bring a drone, a camera, clipboards and survey sheets to collect data. We bring a net just in case we find trash that we scoop up. We drive to the marina, get the boat out on the water, and then start searching for dolphins. We each have binoculars and take a position on the boat. I [sometimes] drive the boat. It takes some practice driving around the dolphins.

Sometimes it’ll be 20 minutes into it and we see a dolphin. But other days we’re out for a couple hours before we see our first, and then it’s pretty exciting. It’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, dolphins 300 meters away at six o’clock!’

What happens when you spot dolphins?

We start what we call an opportunistic survey. Verena Conkin [a Ph.D. candidate] is usually on the bow of the boat taking photos, and she and our professor call out different behaviors that the dolphins are doing. We take a note of the time and write down the behavior, and if they got any photos of it, we make a note of that too.

What kind of behavior are you looking for?

When we first see the dolphins, we’ll record how far away we were when we saw them. We’ll mark a way point on the GPS and then an initial activity that they’re doing, usually something like traveling – they’re going in a straight line – or they’re foraging for food. We’ll also see them socializing, playing with each other, which has been fascinating to watch. We’ll see them bow ride on the boat, especially the males and juveniles. They will come over and swim alongside the boat.

There’s a ton of other specific behaviors: synchronized breathing; if they swim belly up or jump out of the water and do a chin slap, a face slap or a side slap; or they dive and show their tail or their peduncle or different parts of their body. There’s a lot of stuff that our job as the research assistant is to describe. 

How does it feel when you spot a dolphin?

It’s always exciting. This time of year, we see a lot of newborns and calves. Sometimes we see ones that are a few weeks old or a couple of days old, so they’re super tiny and cute. I’d say everybody on the boat — even Professor Mann, who’s been doing this for 40 years — we all still get excited.

I grew up on Galveston Bay in Texas, so we also have bottlenose dolphins at home, but I’d never seen anywhere near this many and never up close.

What have you learned about?

I’ve learned a lot about dolphins in general, their behavior, what’s typical, and specifically about the newborns and calves, since this is particularly important to Verena’s dissertation. One of the behaviors we observe is called baby position, when the baby is underneath the mom nursing. While you can’t directly see this behavior from above the water, we can see [the baby] surface to breathe slightly behind the mother and use that observation to infer what the baby was doing below the water. If the baby wasn’t nursing and surfaces parallel to the mother, it’s called echelon. Since only newborn calves surface in echelon, these kinds of behavioral observations can tell us a lot about the dynamic between the mothers and calves. 

It’s cool to know that, even though the Potomac and the Chesapeake are not the clearest waters in the world, based on how they surface, you can tell what they were doing underneath the water.

What makes dolphin research important? Why should we study them? 

The way I see it, there’s research for the sake of learning, and there’s research for the sake of application. Studying these dolphins fosters a sense of respect and curiosity that fuels the long hours spent sweating on a research vessel and entering data on a laptop, and it fulfills the desire to simply learn more about the way our biological world functions. 

But perhaps more importantly, it helps us understand the biology and behavior of these dolphins so that we can better understand their role in our ecosystems. The more we know about them, the better job we can do in creating policies and practices that support a healthy and productive environment for all the species in the Potomac-Chesapeake region– humans and dolphins included.

How has this experience informed what you want to do next?

I’ll keep working as a research assistant through the fall and the spring hopefully, and continue with coding the data so it becomes usable for everybody who’s doing research.

This experience and the past couple of years have taught me that I want to continue this path of research. I really love being in the field. I’m pretty sure grad school is in my future, but I haven’t quite figured that out much to my parents’ chagrin [laughs]. 

From what I’ve heard from the other research assistants I’m working with, and any grad student and professor, the exploration process is a huge part of deciding where you want to go, especially in biology. I’ve never done anything like this before. I’ve never studied dolphins, so these couple months are super valuable in seeing what I’m interested in and deciding where to go from there.

Editor’s Note: The featured photo was taken under NMFS Permit No. 19403 for the Potomac-Chesapeake Dolphin Project. The photograph is by Megan Wallen (G’17).

The video was taken under NOAA NMFS Permit No. 23782. Disclaimer: The PCDP names dolphins after prominent US political figures and activists. PCDP  chose this naming scheme because the Potomac River runs along Washington, D.C., and is referred to as our “Nation’s River.” Its name choices are intended to reflect U.S. history and are therefore bipartisan and diverse. Names do not reflect the political affiliation, values or beliefs of the PCDP or  any of its researchers.