 |
 |
 |
 |
 ABOUTfeatured: 30 Best Snorkeling Blogs Fun Ways to enjoy the caribbeanArchive for the ‘Marine Mammals’Jan 12, 12 Comments Off
Sunny Curacao greetings everyone. Here is a great baby dolphin shot! This little one is Kanoa. You may recall that Playa Kanoa is a local beach and that is what we named him after. He just turned one year old on December 8th, and isn’t he a super cutie! I think he is one of the cutest babies we have ever had, with his great big eyes and little face and he just loves playing with the trainers and bugging his best friend Roxette. His favorite game is for Roxy to have fish in her mouth and he swims after her trying to get at it. He recently began eating fish himself and now thinks that all fish just must be intended for him. Of course after he is done chasing Roxy he also loves jumping over her, in general just jumping all over the lagoon, like a little horse running all over the field. She is a great Auntie and is very patient and you can often find the two of them hamming it up all over the place. He often has the trainers laughing so hard they almost fall off the platform. His mother is Renata and father is Copan, so he is sure to have both good looks and brains. Can’t wait to see this little fellow in a year or two!
On another note, Aimee picked up a little dog over by the big Chapman boat today and took her in for a vet check and vaccinations. She is super sweet and we have both fallen in love with her from the moment we saw her. She is about 20 weeks old, a female and black and brown. Aimee has named her Lola. Yesterday she got things going by bringing food and water bowls to her area by the big ship. The worker guys have been taking pretty good care of her, feeding her and even giving her stuff for worms and ticks and fleas. For a street dog she looks great. But, more surprising is how much she loves people. She will wiggle out of her skin at the very sight of you and then runs over for some loving. Aimee spent 2 hours at the vet clinic, mostly just waiting for her turn, but in the meantime had a great time walking her around and doing some socializing by just letting her see and hear everything. What a wonderful little one. We are going to get her vaccinations completed, and get her sterilized and go from there. So, you may hear about Lola in the future.
I trust all is well with my groupies out there, sure do miss all you guys!!
Later, Barry
Jan 2, 12 Comments Off
Happy New Year!!!!!!!!! Ok, I’m a day late but what’s new? I hope everyone out there had a great weekend and a safe but fun evening. On Saturday, New Years Eve day I did four dives with the sub! Yep, we had a family of 16 that all went in the sub, they were from a cruise-ship so we really had to hurry and get them back to the docks before 4:00. By 5:00 I was wiped out and not feeling well and ended up staying home with the dogs New Years Eve while, Aimee took the gang on a fantastic boat ride with Dutch and his family to ring in the new year! As hard as I tried to sleep thru the noise it was just impossible and in the end just tried to keep the dogs from barking and going crazy. I think the whole gang came back home from their boat-trip at around 1:30 in the morning and again we all tried to sleep but it was non-stop fireworks all around us till 5:00 am!! I ended up getting 20 minutes sleep the whole night and just gave up and took the dogs out for a long walk early Sunday morning joined by Stijn. We had a great New Years Day walk along the North coast and collected driftwood and other fun stuff while the dogs ran and ran and ran! At 10:00 I took the whole gang to Caracas Bay for a “New Years Dive” at tugboat and finally little Hannah did a 32 minute dive!!! This was officially her first real dive in the ocean and we were all glad to be part of it! I think today they are headed to Puerto Mari for another dive and to just spend the whole day relaxing on the beach. That’s about it, we have all been very busy trying to get in as much fun time as we can with our guests before they leave. Once again, Happy New year!! Talk more tomorrow, Barry Dec 31, 11 Comments Off
Good morning Aimee here, this is the last day of the year, so let’s all make the best of today. Meet momma Renata and baby Kanoa. Kanoa just turned one year old in December. I know I have said this before, but I will say it again, he is one of the most beautiful babies ever! Just take a look at his huge baby eyes, and he has a pretty unique yellowish color on his sides as well. I had to laugh yesterday when Barry came over to this lagoon with me. We had our friends Tammi and Hannah in the water with Renata, Roxette and Kanoa, and suddenly he just went crazy, racing and jumping everywhere. He had us all laughing until our sides ached. At one point he jumped so high and out of control he almost did an entire flip. Wow. Too much fun. Barry is sick again with another cold but somehow managed to do three dives with the sub yesterday?? Today they have a family of 16 arriving from the States and they are all going for a ride in the sub, it will be crazy over there!! Our guests kept very busy yesterday, they first swam with the dolphins and then Scott went for a sub ride down to 500 plus feet! Then at 6:00 Scott and Tammi went on a night dive in front of the Sea Aquarium while Hannah and I took the dogs for a long walk thru the Curacao rain-forest! Barry came home wiped-out, ate dinner standing up and went straight to bed, not sure how he will make it today? Well, thanks for another wonderful year and all the support and help! Hope you all have a fun but safe evening, it will be one crazy night here that’s for sure!! Happy New Year from Curacao!! Aimee, Barry, Indi, Inca, Nila (the cat) Dec 16, 11 Comments Off
Good morning from sickville! Yep I finally am sick with a stupid cold! But the bright side if there is one, it’s been almost a year since I was last sick, so I have done pretty good until now. I was unable to go the Sea Aquarium Christmas party last night because of the non-stop nose blowing and coughing, really didn’t want to make everyone there sick. Aimee at least went and she looked great in her full length dress, I think this is the second Christmas party I have missed due to sickness.
Yesterday was a really bad day for the local wildlife and beautiful vegetation that we HAD around our house and neighborhood. A group of so-called experts came in with machetes and leveled our beautiful back yard and wiped out two thirty foot trees saying “they needed to be pruned”! Ignorance runs wild here and with zero training I guess they just don’t know or care? We had one of the best flowering yards in the whole area! Most of you are smart enough to know the difference in pruning and cutting a whole adult tree down to it’s stump right?? Aimee went over in tears to the land-lord across the street but she’s as dumb as the rest of them telling Aimee “they are professionals with certificates, I will send you a photo, you just have to see it! So now we will have no shade on the house, no where for all my birds to nest or hide during the rain and no protection from the kids throwing rocks at our windows! Real smart folks! If those trees survive, which I doubt they will it will take years for them to grow back and unfortunately this is the kind of stuff we deal with here on a daily basis! As you can tell we are really upset, and they did this up and down the street, it looks awful!
All went well yesterday at the US Embassy, Aimee made appointments for us for next week to get new passports, they said it will only take 10 days, so that’s good news!
Here is Tela and Pasku preparing to jump out of the water and soar high in the sky for all to see! We have three dolphin shows a day here at Dolphin Academy and they are always a big hit with the visitors!
Running late again, sniff, sniff, see you soon, Barry
Dec 1, 11 Comments Off
Good morning friends, I received a note yesterday saying I won 2nd place in the 2012 “Bonaire Nights” photo contest with a photo of a Web Burrfish, here is the link to the photo in case you have forgotten. http://www.coralreefphotos.com/web-burrfish-chilomycterus-antillarum-porcupinefish/ The photo will run for a year in their new publication that can be found all over the island in just about every store, restaurant and hotel. These Web Burrfish are not found here in Curacao, this was the first one I had ever seen all thanks to our friends Sal and Patty who led the dive at Eden Beach. I remember that dive like it was yesterday as it took team-work to get this photo and along with seeing this cool fish Sal went on to find and show us many more cool things, so thanks again guys!!
Yesterday was a fairly busy day at the Substation, we had customers at 11:00 and 1:00 which meant I was underwater to properly greet them! We usually do the photos first thing with clients and that takes me less than five minutes, after I am done I give a signal or a wave and off they go into the darkness. I then get out, rinse everything, take the camera back inside and work on the photos I just took for around 30 minutes. When the sub returns, usually and hour and a half we have all the photos ready and I even make a cool “Certificate of Submersion” for them with their photo on it to take home as well. After work I met Stijn and off we went on a fast 15 mile/one hour ride under overcast skies. I can see it’s going to be harder and harder to get rides in with this crazy weather lately.
Here are some jumping dolphins for all my neglected dolphin lovers out there, I guess the photo just speaks for itself!
Running late, have a super great day!! Barry
Nov 25, 11 Comments Off
Good morning everyone. Wow, it sure is rainy season for us down here right now! The trails are growing faster than we can cut them, and I told Barry he needed a jet ski and not a mountain bike if he wanted to go riding!
Well, of course if it’s a baby dolphin, I am usually behind the keyboard, and this is a newborn calf from a year or two ago. They are so perfect, they look plastic. Barry likes to photograph them in the first few days because of the way they throw their head up and out of the water to breath. Dolphins have to learn the “breathing roll”, where mostly only the blowhole comes out of the water and they can take a quick breath and keep moving. Baby dolphins are not that coordinated in their swimming and breathing yet, and use a much more exaggerated movement of coming up and out of the water for each breath. That, of course, gives him a better chance of a nice photo of a beautiful dolphin face. You can barely see the dorsal fin of the mother beside this baby, and that is right where he will stay at all times, unless he is nursing. By staying close by mother, the baby uses very little energy for swimming and just stays in the slip stream and gets pulled right along. They more or less move as one unit. Baby dolphins have to be born very physically advanced. Then need to swim, nurse, and breath. But, they don’t moved far away from mom for at least a month, and neither will sleep during the fist month or two either. Tough stuff, isn’t it?
Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving. I got to talk to my wonderful family on skype yesterday. When you live this far away you have to love skype! We then went to Thanksgiving dinner over at Augustos. It is a great meal with all the “fixings”, but it is under the palm trees and ocean. Nice combo. Well, it’s Black Friday….now go out and shop!
Aimee
Nov 3, 11 Comments Off
Good morning friends, here is baby Pasku once again for all my patient dolphin lovers out there. I know I used to send out more dolphin photos but since moving over to the Substation I just don’t seem to get over to Dolphinville as much as I would like. I do get to go on some dolphin dives out in the open ocean once in a while, where I took this photo but other than that I am kind of out of the dolphin-loop as of late. Aimee usually tells me immediately when she gets home each day about what Pasku did out on any given open ocean dive. She has been doing all the underwater video for the past year for Dolphin Academy and the divers from Ocean Encounters so after a dive she hands the camera off to the photo department and then sometimes if it was a great dive she requests a copy for herself. Pasku really is a complete joy to be with, he will just swim over and stop in front of you and let you pet him or like most times he just chases fish and puts on a real live underwater dolphin behavior show for all to see.
I want to apologize to everyone tuning into the underwater Substation camera yesterday, we were so late again getting the sub out! I got home and had at least 20 e-mails from you all saying you were there but saw nothing. One lucky person tuned in late and got to see the whole show which is cool if you get to see it. For some reason we just can’t seem to get that thing out and underwater in a timely fashion so I am going to stop giving you times for now that way no one is just sitting there waiting. I wish I could alert everyone 10 minutes before we go under, like have all your e-mails ready on the computer and click “send” minutes before we go?? Any ideas please let me know.
I am off to the sea, talk more soon, Barry
Oct 25, 11 Comments Off
Good morning everyone, Aimee here. I always enjoy writing if it is some of our dolphins for the daily photo! This is one from about a week ago when Barry and I did the dolphin dive with the American veterans. It was a beautiful dive with clear water and our little fellow Pasku and his auntie Annie. I love going on dives, especially with Pasku who is becoming quite the hunter. Right now you can see us over the coral reef, but we move onto a sand-flat area surrounded by gorgonians and large coral heads. There are tons of fish around this area and Pasku is always looking for his next victim. Usually he gets a small fish out of a gorgonian, but on this dive he did one of his funniest things ever. There were two large French angelfish hanging out around a boulder coral and he snuck up behind the coral and was trying to catch one. The angelfish of course ran to the other side of the coral, and then he tried to sneak up on the other one. He kept hiding behind this coral, first on one side, then on the other with the Frenchies trying to dash and hide. I was laughing so hard! He never did catch one, it was mostly just a game of hide-and-seek. Just a bit later, they disappeared from sight and then a grey racing blur came by us. Well, it was our little guy Pasku again, this time hot on the trail of a 10 inch silver Jack fish. Wow, they were flying! He was only inches behind this fish, and they were like two fighter jets, one trying to loose the other, right-left, up and down. What an amazing thing to see! That is one of the reasons the dive is so great. The dolphins are very used to having humans around watching them, but they also display natural behaviors such as hunting. The veterans enjoyed this dive so much, with lots of thumbs up and fists in the air. It is so nice to be a part of giving just a little back to people who have given us all so much. Thanks again!
Have a great day everyone. Aimee
Sep 30, 11 Comments Off
Good morning everyone and welcome to the Dolphin Academy, ”dolphin training team”! Yes, here we are in all our wetsuit glory at the local movie theater for the premier of the new movie “Dolphin Tale”! This movie is about the true story of Winter, a young bottlenose dolphin that stranded in Florida, and was rescued by the Clearwater Marine Aquarium. Winter needs to have her tale amputated due to the extent of her injury and this is the story of the people surrounding her, and her incredible will to survive.
Well, in combination with the Curacao Movies, the Southern Caribbean Cetacean Network (SCCN) and Dolphin Academy, we had a special educational promotion and movie premier in which the trainers came dressed in their “uniform”, our director and veterinarian were available for questions and also shown was the movie from our rescue of Sully the pilot whale, who stranded here in Curacao several years ago and was rescued, rehabilitated and eventually found a new permanent home at Sea World of San Diego. For fun and interesting videos of Sully you can just look up on You-Tube, Sully the pilot whale. There are great videos and even interviews by George and me. After having lived through that experience, many of us trainers and the volunteers could look at this wonderful movie with a different point of view. I definitely recommend taking your friends and family to see this movie, it is a great representation of the time, effort and love that we as trainers put into our animal friends each and every day. One of my colleagues even told me after the movie “wow, I look at this film and think about how lucky these people were to be involved with working with these wonderful animals every day, and this is just what we get to do”! Our job working with dolphins is something we all try to recognize and appreciate each and every day.
So, to answer a question most of you probably have, yes we did get to change before the movie started!
Have a wonderful Day!! Aimee (purple whistle)
Sep 3, 11 Comments Off
Good morning everyone, Aimee here. If there’s a photo of a dolphin you have my attention! This is Tela and little Pasku, with Tela sticking out her tongue. I think of all the dolphins I have ever seen, Tela has for sure, hands down, the longest tongue! It is one of the funniest behaviors that she does, always making everyone laugh. Most of the other dolphins do this, but Tela’s is, for sure, the best. We will have to wait and see if Pasku inherits his mother’s gift! I am standing on our submerged platform, we do a great program from here with guests. The guests stand next to us and we lay the dolphin out sideways so they can touch, and we give them a lesson about dolphin anatomy and behavior. It is my favorite program because people get to see the dolphins up close and I get to teach them about how amazing these creature are. I meet people from everywhere, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, (my Spanish is getting much better), Germany, Poland, Russia, all parts of Europe and of course Holland (still need to work on my Dutch). It is especially fun when I get to be with my friend Tela and get some extra hugs and kisses. Some days it is still hard to believe that we call this work.
Well, it’s just a short weekend note for today. Hope you have a great one, stay safe and enjoy it! Aimee
Aug 30, 11 Comments Off
Good morning friends, I spent a good part of the day yesterday moving our new permanent video camera to a new underwater location. The spot it has been in was too low, it was great for watching the fish but we were not able to see the sub. So yesterday I cut all the cables and untied it from the rock we had it on and moved it to a new spot in around 25 feet of water, it’s now tied to the tip of a big boulder. If you have time tune in today as we will be out there on the reef with the sub at 11:15 and 1:15. Here is the link again, http://www.seesubmarine.com/ This new video camera is a work in progress, we will continue to make it better each day and I think we even ordered a new wide-angle lens for it as well yesterday, not sure what it on there now but it is not enough.
For my dolphin lovers, here is an old shot of Tela and Pasku I took months ago but like everything here seems like just yesterday. Now that I am over with the sub I don’t see the dolphins much anymore and Aimee is the one now doing all the dives with them. She is the lucky person who gets to go out on every dolphin dive and shoot video for the dolphin Academy Photoshop and she loves it. Most days after the dive she either calls me or rushes over to tell me about either something cool she just saw like a passing eagle ray or a turtle or tells me something cool the dolphins just did, for me it’s just like being there, without the camera of course!
I am running late, thanks for all driftwood comments from yesterdays photo, Barry
Aug 14, 11 Comments Off
Good evening or good morning, how was the weekend?? Mine was semi-uneventful as I really haven’t felt so great these past few days and after my crazy dive on Friday I really felt bad. When I got to work Friday morning the ocean was going crazy! Big swells were rolling in and mostly from the wrong direction which meant there was no way we could launch the sub in these choppy waters. A decision was made immediately to use the big crane and pick up and remove our custom made “sub dock” from the water as it was going to get damaged if the waves got any bigger or kept up at this pace. Upon hearing this I begged them to please give me an hour first so I could jump in with scuba gear and remove all the animals that call this floating platform/dock home, mostly big red-banded cleaner shrimps. If the platform were to be picked up all these animals would go with it and die, they don’t know better than to abandon ship! So I quickly grabbed a friend to help and after finding 50 little plastic jars with lids (made to hold small fish) we jumped in! The water in the basin was like a washing machine, you could hardly see the hand in front of your face let alone your dive buddy, it was really insane and now that I look back very dangerous. I had my friend hold the two mesh bags (one filled with cups and the other empty) and stay under the bouncing platform on the sand, I told her before getting in that I will bring the creatures to you, just keep giving me new cups and put the live specimens in the empty bag. Luckily for me I knew where every animal lived under this massive floating dock and one by one I captured and cupped them and soon after 45 minutes we had them all, almost 50 creatures! Then with a final “OK” signal underwater we both took off out to the reef to find homes for each and every creature and within minutes we had them moved into their new homes. As we got back to the surface the dock or platform was gone and we ended up having to exit the rough water on the rocks, an adventure in itself! After this adventure I felt very sea-sick the rest of the day after being under that dock for an hour being tossed around like a piece of driftwood, it really wore me out. That evening I felt worse and Saturday wasn’t much better but I did take the dogs to Saint Joris just the same. Today we (me and the dogs) went back again to the North coast as the driftwood just continues to float in which is great for my inventory! Aimee left the house at 5:00am this morning to go to her triathlon race which started at 7:00, and yes she did great! I went and picked her up from the race at 2:00pm as she had no way to get back home and was trying to call me for the past few hours, I really hate cell phones sometimes! So that’s our weekend in a nutshell, we just got back from the movies and saw “Bad Teacher” it’s not bad, guessing it won’t win any awards!
Here’s a priceless newborn baby dolphin calf that I photographed years ago, so many years in fact that I can’t even remember what mother this was, so many baby dolphins so little time!!
Off to bed after a long day, have a great Monday, Barry
Jul 27, 11 Comments Off
Good morning one and all, Aimee here along with a wonderful photo of Pasku. Most of you know that Pasku is the son of one of the most amazing dolphins ever; Tela. I worked with Tela for years over at the therapy area. Pasku was born on Christmas day (when my family was visiting) in 2008. In the local language Bon Pasku means “Merry Christmas”, so that is how he got his name! He is an amazing little guy; his mother loves people and is so fun and interactive and he definitely inherited her personality. You may recall from some past photos of our trainer “Junior” holding him or hugging him. He is kind of like a big puppy dog letting us just love all over him. Pasku does open water dives, where he follows a boat (or the boat follows him) and dives out on the reef with guests that are scuba diving. I am now doing quite a bit of underwater video of these dives for Dolphin Academy and see tons of fun behaviors on almost every dive. On one of our last dives the dive master got my attention and showed me a small eel that was hanging vertical in the water about 12 feet above the reef. That is very unusual because the eels never leave the safety of the reef. Well, shortly after I spotted it Pasku also came over to see what we were looking at. He echolocated on it, made a few funny vocal sounds at it and then “snap!”, he grabbed that eel and took off with it at full speed! He swam around with the eel half in and half out of his mouth, letting it go and then grabbing it up again. He played around for several minutes, then seemed to have enough and “Glump”, down it went, yes poor eel but food is food. It was awesome! So fun to see. Pasku has learned through watching his momma how to be a great hunter. Well, that can all come underneath the label of another day at work for us down here. Not too bad.
Have a great day yourself. Aimee
Jun 24, 11 Comments Off
Good evening everyone, dolphin girl here! I love doing the blog when it is a dolphin, because then I get to brag on my best friends! Best friends with fins, that is. So, this handsome young man is Romeo. He is a seven year old male dolphin. That makes him a teenager. My friend Michelle will love this photo because this is her “main man”! I am sure she will recognize him immediately. Barry is always surprised when I can name almost any of our dolphins from an old photo, but to those of us that look at them every day they all look quite different. For instance, Romeo is quite light grey, he has a sloping head and a distinctive scar on the left side of his body above the pectoral fin. He also has very recognizable eyes that are often kind of squinty. We laugh because those eyes are usually looking for some kind of trouble, most likely chasing and playing with the other teenage boys in the lagoon. His best friend is probably Caiyo, another teenage male. It is not surprising that they would form a strong bond because in bottlenose dolphins the male/male pair bond is the longest relationship. Males will breed with females, and that is the end of any “male parental investment”, the female of course raises her calf for 2-3 years, basically until she has another baby. But, the males do form long bonds with each other, sometimes lasting for almost their entire lives. They usually begin hanging out as teenagers, like Romeo and Caiyo, then in adulthood it is beneficial to be together as well. Two dolphins together ensures better hunting, more eyes and ears for avoiding being hunted and gives a guy a better shot at breeding (two boys can fight off even a bigger, single male). Copan, our big male has never formed a long bond with another male, but he is one super big guy, and obviously has his pick of women at our place. Romeo and Caiyo are too young to reproduce yet, but will get bigger as time goes by. I know of two dolphins from Rotan that were pair bonded for more than 15 years. Well, there is your dolphin lesson for the day, hope you enjoyed!
Have a great weekend folks, Aimee
Jun 12, 11 Comments Off
Hi Friends, how was your weekend?? Curacao is being hit with some serious wind at the moment and has turned super hot!! I heard today at the aquarium the waves were so big they were coming in over the breakwater and spilling into the dolphin lagoons and at times it was just solid sea foam. I had a serious exercise day. I left the house at 6:38 before the wind got any stronger and did a two hour, 25 plus mile ride to the North coast and back. The wind was so strong that when I got to the first windmill over by Canoa it took only six minutes to ride past them all, that’s traveling at around 35mph down a fun, little narrow dirt road with a serious tail-wind! I must say though I was beat when I got home, trying to pedal into that wind is nothing to laugh about! Once home, I immediately threw the bike in the door and loaded the dogs and took off for another two hour adventure back where I had just rode the bike thru an hour earlier. We walked the shores of Saint Joris collecting wood and treasures and ended up finding some more great stuff as this wind storm is really bringing in the beach goodies. The dogs had a blast and spent most of the time in the water chasing the kite surfers who would surf over just to tease the dogs. I think we got home at around 11:00 and after washing the dogs I took off to the glass beach for an hour and a half of treasure collecting. The rest of the day was spent hiding from the wind and the heat, it was really a pretty great Sunday.
This is for my dolphin friends, three beautiful Bottlenose dolphins doing what they love to do, jump!
Sorry so short, I have lots to do still this evening, have a great week!! Barry
SITE MAP
CategoriesArchives |
|
