Bottlenose dolphins in the Baltic Sea

This video is about bottlenose dolphins in the the Bay of Biscay.

Bottlenose dolphins in Baltic waters?!

19.02.2016

A pair of bottlenose dolphins have been cruising the Baltic Sea recently. They’re not native to those waters, and must have come in from the North Atlantic. They’ve now developed a fondness for bow-wake cruising.

What scuba divers would be used to seeing in the waters of the Flensburg Fjord – in the westernmost part of the Baltic Sea near the northern German town of Flensburg on the Danish border – can be summed up in two very short words: Not much. But over the past couple of months, divers and boaters have been astonished to find themselves accompanied on occasion by a couple of playful bottlenose dolphins.

On Thursday this week (18.02.2016), a kayaker and a diver spent some quality time with “Selfie” and “Delfie,” as the dolphins have come to be called. Last summer, the pair played in the bow-wake of a tourist boat off the south coast of Sweden. Their maneuvers have become a local sensation. …

“It’s pretty special having this dolphin species here,” said Harald Benke, director of the German Ocean Museum Stralsund, who wrote his PhD about whales and dolphins. Common dolphins or white-beaked dolphins have occasionally been seen in Baltic waters, according to Benke – but bottlenose dolphins, almost never.

Since record-keeping began, there have been only three previous sightings of bottlenoses, the marine biologist said: A dead bottlenose was found floating in the waters near Stralsund in 1842, and another near Lübeck in 1882.

In 1852, a pod of bottlenoses was seen swimming in the shallow waters near Greifswald. Other than those three incidents, all has been quiet on the bottlenose-dophin-spotting front in the Baltic Sea over the past couple of centuries.

The two bottlenoses now cruising the Baltic must have entered from the Atlantic nearly a year ago. They spent the summer off Kalmar in southern Swedish waters, where they were also a hit with tourists.

Bottlenose dolphins found living off English coast in ‘incredibly exciting’ discovery. Researchers say the dolphins, the only pod to take up residence in British waters, were present in large numbers off the south-west coast, particularly around St Ives Bay and Mount’s Bay: here.