Since then, the scientist and executive director of Oceans Initiative, a non-profit marine life conservation centre, has dedicated her career to these animals. Her research involves using photo-identification methodology to track the dolphin population off the northeastern coast of Vancouver Island in the Broughton Archipelago. The goal is to photograph each of the dolphins as they breach the water, ideally capturing photos of them from both sides. These photos can then be used by the researcher to identify individual dolphins based on the notches, scars, scratches and markings on their dorsal fins.
“Photo-identification is a great way to monitor a particular population year upon year,” Ashe explains. “You can look at the demographic component in relation to different environmental factors, like how the prey is doing or whether they’re affected by predation.”
Monitoring a concentrated population also allows Ashe to gather a detailed assessment of injury rates, how often females are calving, and whether they develop long-term, sociological relationships with others in their pod.
But while each dolphin is unique, just as each human is, it is very difficult to collect a high-quality, usable photograph of each animal when it’s part of a pod of several hundred. “That’s where we rely on statistics and different mathematical approaches to estimate things like abundance and survival and fidelity,” Ashe explains.