THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, August 1, 1996 TAG: 9608010431
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY PAUL CLANCY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: 115 lines
When Mark Swingle takes to the ocean off the Virginia coast, he's among old friends.
``There's a great fin right there,'' he exclaimed as the jagged dorsal fin of a bottlenose dolphin broke the ribbed, blue-gray surface off Croatan Beach.
Swingle, assistant curator of the Virginia Marine Science Museum, was on board ``Miss Virginia Beach,'' the boat the museum uses to take visitors on its daily Dolphin Watch rides. Tuesday afternoon, the ocean was alive with dolphins sweeping across the boat's bow, breaching and playing nearby.
``In fact, that's a known animal,'' he added. ``That's `Shark Fin.' He's been coming here the last four or five years.'' When the sleek gray mammal reappeared, its fin bore the mangled look of a shark bite, probably received in infancy.
Such chomp marks, tooth rakes and other nicks, gouges and scars are the fingerprints that have allowed Swingle and other researchers at the museum to keep track of the thousands of dolphins that visit and sweep by the coastline every year.
Swingle is the coordinator of the annual dolphin count, a census of the marine mammals that has estimated their numbers every year since 1993.
This Saturday, more than 100 volunteer counters will spread out along the Virginia coast from Maryland to North Carolina. Watching from posts about 1.5 miles apart, some on remote islands on the Eastern Shore, the volunteers will attempt to count every dolphin passing a fixed point within a four-hour time frame.
Because the animals surface only briefly, occasionally double back and often run in packs, the count is an educated guess. It's a ``snapshot'' of the state's dolphin numbers. The team will have the help of four boats and an airplane.
What the counts have shown is not so much a numerical increase or decrease in the dolphin population, which has averaged more than 400 each year, but an indication of its stability.
``We have a pretty good feeling that they're not decreasing,'' Swingle said, watching a pod of young dolphins at play close to the boat.
``Each year we get a little more of the big picture,'' he said. ``The knowledge we have is very reassuring.''
The museum combines the count with a photo project that identifies the dolphins by their markings. The photo library includes 500 animals identified by their nicks and scars.
Coordinating with similar programs from bordering coastal states, researchers have established that the dolphins roaming the state's coastal waters are migratory, moving as far as Florida to New Jersey.
They have also proven that Virginia Beach has one of the greatest concentrations of migratory dolphins on the East Coast.
Swingle, 41, the first person hired by museum director C. Mac Rawls 14 years ago, probably knows more about the migrating patterns, the playfulness, the mating rituals and the lives and deaths of dolphins than anyone else in Virginia.
Growing up in Virginia Beach and surfing, he got to know the dolphins early in life. He still surfs when he can, runs for exercise and plays guitar and banjo for relaxation.
He and his wife, Lucy, a nurse at Virginia Beach General Hospital, have two children, 6-year-old Charlie and 4-year-old Colleen.
Dolphins have defined Swingle's career. In 1987, a few years after he joined the museum's staff with a master's degree in biological oceanography from Old Dominion University, he witnessed the greatest known dolphin die-off in history. More than 1,200 dolphins perished along the coast, the largest percentage of them in Virginia.
A Who's Who of the nation's dolphin experts descended on the museum and, with Swingle, dissected hundreds of the animals and determined that they died from a lethal dose of biotoxins.
Soon after, he took part in rescuing and relocating a dolphin that was trapped in Broad Bay. It attracted so much attention, the media dubbed it ``Rascal.''
Clark Lee Merriam, a longtime volunteer, observed that Swingle was thrown into the job at an exciting time. ``All of a sudden, he was in charge of all kinds of stuff. He was young, the museum was young and he handled it all admirably.''
Donations for the rescue effort went into a bank account that became the initial funding for the museum's Stranding Network, a group of volunteers that goes to the aid of beached and stranded marine mammals. The group in turn formed the core of the Dolphin Count.
``What became real evident to us is how much we didn't know about the dolphins that visit our coast,'' Swingle said. ``Nobody knew how many there were, if they were here for a week or several months, or if they swam through on their way somewhere else.''
This year, more of the story will emerge. Female dolphins give birth every two years, Swingle said. He added that because 1994 saw a large number of newborn dolphins, ``we may see another pulse this year of young animals.''
Swingle would spend all of his time on the dolphin and stranding team activities if he could. Now, he he spends most of his time seeing to the pumps, filters, water quality and dozens of other systems that keep the museum's animals healthy. His main job is overseeing all of its fish exhibits.
He performs the task with scientific zeal, his colleagues say.
``He's one of the most conscientious people I know,'' said museum curator Maylon White. ``He's one of the reasons I can move kind of fast. He's there to keep me from falling off the cliff.''
Added Rawls, ``Like most employees, here, he has a great deal of devotion to what he does.''
Although dolphins range over the entire state coastline, the vast majority are seen off Virginia Beach. It is one of many reasons Swingle feels he is in the right place at the right time.
As dolphins followed the boat back toward Rudee Inlet, he said, ``I don't think most people realize how special this coastline is.
``We clearly have one of the greatest concentrations of dolphins on the East Coast. It's a dolphin hot spot.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
D. KEVIN ELLIOTT/The Virginian-Pilot
Mark Swingle, assistant curator of the Virginia Marine Science
Museum, is coordinating Saturday's annual census of dolphins along
the Virginia coast.
Graphic
ANNUAL DOLPHIN COUNTS (ESTIMATED)
SOURCE: Virginia Marine Science Museum
[For complete graphic, please see microfilm] by CNB