A Florida bowfishing guide has developed an unusual partnership with the aquatic life of the Gulf of Mexico. For more than a decade, Crystal Bay charter captain Justin Dymond has been attracting pods of dolphins with the underwater flood lights he uses to locate fish for his bowfishing clients. As soon as the fish are visible and stunned by the lights, the dolphins start snatching them.
Lots of anglers know this dynamic all too well, especially in Florida, where one recent study showed that 43% of anglers had experienced depredation of their catch by sharks.
But Dymond says that losing those few fish is completely worth it: in exchange, the dolphins drive fish into shallower water, where bowfishers can more easily see and kill them. Speaking to the Tampa Bay Times about the dolphins, Dymond said, “Every year they get better at hunting. It’s a unique situation where everybody wins.”
Just like feists driving squirrels up trees, Dymond calls the dolphins his quote-unquote “aqua dogs.” He’s even named the individuals who turn up night after night: Crystal, Echo, Bunny, Knuckles, and my favorite, Tetris.
All this might sound like a devoted fan of dolphins assigning intention to a standard behavior like swimming toward schools of fish. But in the videos Dymond posts, you can clearly see a distinct behavior from the dolphins: they form a perimeter around the smaller fish and flap their tails to flush them toward the anglers.
Dymond told MeatEater that although he’s been guiding for almost fifteen years, he only started to see the flushing behavior about seven years ago. At first, it was hard to tell what was happening, but night after night of seven or eight hours on the water, the behavior got stronger and stronger. He said, “Even now, all these years later, I see it and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.”
This is a perfect case of mutualism, where two species adapt to help the other access resources they couldn’t get on their own. Another great example is the African Honeyguide, birds that depend on eating the eggs and larvae of bees to survive but don’t have the tools to break into nests themselves.
But Honeyguides are experts at locating hidden bees nests, and once they find one, they persistently call to humans like a feathered dinner bell. People come break open the nests to get the honey, and the birds stick around to get the grubs. Studies have shown that the Hazda people of Tanzania get as many as 10% of their total calories with the help of Greater Honeyguides.
Researchers had never seen this kind of mutualism with dolphins until they started joining Dymond on his bowfishing trips, but now they are taking advantage of this symbiosis.
Scientists from the University of Florida and the Cedar Key Dolphin Project have been building a photographic database of this population of dolphins as they come in for dinner. They’ve also been able to collect valuable DNA samples by holding petri dishes over the dolphins’ blowholes to catch the spray kicked up as they exhale.
They’ve even observed mature dolphins bringing young calves along for the hunts, as though to train them for future trips. Who knows, maybe generations from now we’ll be calling them Gulf Setters or Floridian Smooth-Skinned Pointers.
Images via Justin Dymond.
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