Dolphin Exercise Session - Dolphin Quest Oahu

Aloha friends! My name is Carrie. I'm a Marine Mammal Specialist here at Dolphin Floss Oahu, located at the lovely Kahala Hotel and Resort, and you're watching A Day in the Life of a Marine Mammal Specialist. Let's go see what's in store for us today. If you've been following along with our Day in the Life vlog series, you've probably learned all about the amazing enrichment that keeps our dolphins' playful minds engaged and the incredible level of veterinary care that is central to our Dolphin Quest culture. Today, we're going to give you an inside look at our exercise session. Physical exercise is not only an important part of our dolphins' active lifestyle, but it's also a memorable opportunity for our guests to witness their power and grace. So one interesting piece of equipment that you might see us using here is this. So this is called a D-Tag, and the best way I can think of about how to explain this is basically that it's like a dolphin Fitbit. So it records different aspects of physiological information, like how fast they're swimming, how deep they're diving. So I could tell you what I know about the scientific equipment as a Marine Mammal Specialist who works around that equipment on a daily basis and around the animals as well, but wouldn't it be great to hear from the scientists who actually use that equipment in the field with wild dolphins and interpret that data themselves? These types of tags have been used on dozens of cetacean species in the wild, from the tiny harbor porpoise all the way up to the blue whale. They have a variety of sensors, including hydrophones and pressure sensors that tell us about the animal's behavior. They also have accelerometers which measure movement similar to your Fitbit or your smartwatch. And this can tell us if a boat disturbs an animal, for example, and causes it to swim faster, we can detect that. But to understand the energetic costs of repeated disturbances, we need to link movement with energy use. To do that, we work with collaborators at University of Michigan and Oceanographic Valencia in Spain to conduct some trials of Dolphin Quest, where the animals swim at different speeds while wearing the tag. They come back, they breathe into a device that measures caliber use, and then knowing that link, we can look at tag deployments in the wild to estimate human impacts on those populations. So we're going to show you how this works. So right now we're going to be placing this D-tag on one of our dolphins, Hua, and this is Hua right behind me with his friend Aaron. And Hua is our youngest dolphin, he's one of the most energetic, so he finds these high-energy behaviors really, really reinforcing. So this is one of his favorite activities. So what we're going to do, I'm going to ask Aaron to place this tag on Hua. It's got these nice, comfortable suction cups on there that stay put, but also are comfortable to the animals. So now the tag is on, and now we can ask Hua for one of those behaviors that we see him emit in his free time all of the time. So let's ask him for a speed swim while he's wearing the tag. Check this out. Physical exercise, we know that it benefits our animals. We want their muscles to be just as strong as their minds are. So with these behaviors that are highly physical and highly acrobatic, one, we know that it's fun for the dolphins to do. So all the behaviors that you might see us asking for are things that we've seen the dolphins emit during their own free time and their own play time, and that's why we train them in the first place. Two, it's fun for people to watch. How amazing is it to see a 10-foot dolphin who weighs 550 pounds leap almost 20 feet out of the air? It's incredible. It's very memorable. It's impactful to our guests. And like everything we do here at Dolphin Quest, we want it to be good for the animals. We want people to enjoy witnessing it. But third, of course, there's an amazing synergy between animal wellness, scientific study, and public education. Thanks for following along with me today. If you enjoyed this video, please be sure to like and subscribe so you can stay up to date with us for future updates on a day in the life of a marine mammal specialist. Aloha, friends. Until next time.