hollymathwriter
- Jan 24, 2023
- 2 min read

Moorea

January 22, 2023

Moorea

View from ship:

We left Tahiti early in the morning today and had a brief cruise to Moorea. It is pronounced Mo-o-ray – a (long os, a long a, and then a short a – all the vowels are usually voiced in Tahitian.) Brent headed off to snorkeling in the morning and I had a lazy morning while I waited for my dolphin cruise in the afternoon.

Brent saw sting rays, sharks, and green sea turtles and lots of fish while snorkeling. Sadly there was a bit of a camera misfunction underwater and he didn’t get any undersea pictures. Here are a few he snapped before going under.

I boarded the dolphin watching boat with high hopes of seeing spinner dolphins. They have a 95% success rate. Sadly, today’s excursion fell in that unlucky five percent. The guide was great though! He has spent years and years in Moorea researching dolphins. He drafted the proposal to make the islands of Tahiti a dolphin and whale sanctuary. (They are also a shark sanctuary.) Although Tahitians have never hunted dolphins or whales, the sanctuary protects them from other dangers such as ships and boats going too fast and hitting them or allowing tourists to get in the water and swim with them or try to touch them.

His research focuses on three things. The first is the identification of the dolphins and tracking their movements and socialization. The spinner dolphins are very social and do not stay in a single pod. From day to day they move to different pods so every time the researchers meet a pod of dolphins there are different dolphins in the pod. How do they tell the dolphins apart? They look at their dorsal fins. Just as every person’s face is different, every dolphin’s dorsal fin is different. Here is an example of the dorsal fins of 12 of the dolphins who visit the lagoon.

The second is recording the dolphins as they talk to each other. They discovered that the spinner dolphins in Tahiti have a different dialect than the spinner dolphins in Hawaii even though they are the exact same species and sub-species. That is like the difference between an American saying “French fries” and the British saying “chips” or an Australian saying “jumper” and an American saying “sweater”. So although the Tahitian and Hawaiian spinnerets could communicate, some of their “words” would be different.

The third area of study is the dolphin DNA. They use it to trace the relationships and ancestry of the dolphins. They collect it by attaching a sponge to a long handle and gently rubbing the dolphin’s skin. They can double check their visual identifications with the DNA also.

Our WAVA symbol is the orca or killer whale. Did you know that they are dolphins also? They have conical teeth like all dolphins do. Here is the difference in size between a spinner dolphin tooth and an orca tooth.