As reports of the dolphin duo emerged over the weekend, St Lawrence said the biggest reaction Gotham Whale received was concern from people who wondered whether the dolphins were OK. “We’ve seen dolphins and other marine life end up in some of these polluted canals and then end up dying and people were worried about that happening with these animals right in the East River,” St Lawrence explained, adding: “But experts have shown that the East River is the cleanest now than it’s been in a century.”.
“We received a few reports that morning that people driving along the Franklin D Roosevelt East River Drive saw dolphins jumping in the water,” Chris St Lawrence, a researcher and spokesperson for Gotham Whale, a local marine tracking and research organization, said, referring to the busy Manhattan highway that runs along the shoreline.
When New Yorkers were graced by the presence of two dolphins in the city’s East River earlier this month, marine experts said such a sighting was rare – but also a sign that this spring and summer season could be a good one for spotting more marine mammals, both great and small.
Pointing to the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the 1972 Clean Water Act, which regulates discharges of pollutants into waters across the US, St Lawrence said: “These environmental regulations have cleaned up our city’s waterways, enabling things like fish to marine mammals to come into these waters and survive.”.
Describing the physical differences between common short-beaked dolphins and bottlenose dolphins, which are more typically spotted from local beaches, St Lawrence said the most visible marker of the former species was the yellowish hourglass marking along their sides.
