O ne afternoon in September 2022, researchers from the the Galveston Bay Foundation’s Dolphin Research Program spied a lone bottlenose shadowing a shrimp trawler in the middle of the bay, on the edge of the Houston Ship Channel.
Out on a routine monitoring survey, the team followed the dolphin for about 35 minutes. Eventually, it joined about 25 other dolphins to forage around the trawler’s nets, but did not interact with any of them. Upon closer inspection, the team discovered that this dolphin’s tail was missing its flukes, the horizontal lobes that give the tail its Y-like shape and, more importantly, help propel the dolphin through the water.
And although it moved somewhat unusually, for obvious reasons, the researchers found that the dolphin seemed to be swimming just fine…