Stripes

I met this dolphin on New Year’s Day 2024 while spending about an hour in the water with a pod of eight Bottlenose dolphins in Bimini. They were crater feeding—diving head-first into the sand and using echolocation to flush out fish buried below. That alone can leave scrapes on their snouts from rubbing against the seafloor, but this particular dolphin had scars that immediately caught my attention. From a distance, dolphins always look like they’re smiling, but up close, you start to see the stories written on their skin. They go through fights, mating battles, territorial disputes, encounters with predators—and sometimes even boating accidents. When I freedived down to its level, this dolphin with the distinctive eye stripes circled me calmly, made direct eye contact, and then surfaced beside me as if inviting me to breathe with it. I couldn’t help wondering how it earned each one of those marks. Some of the scars on its face are definitely from crater feeding—you can see the scrapes along the snout from pushing into the sand. But the deeper marks? That’s the mystery. Was it from another dolphin during mating season? A run-in with a shark? A boat strike? Or just the rough reality of ocean life?