Just recently, Dr. Dani Kerem of the Institute of Marine Medicine, Oren Sonin of the Fishing Division at the Ministry of Agriculture, and I presented a study at a conference of the Marine Mammal Society in Florida, with special findings on the relationship between dolphins and trawlers in Israel. The dolphins swim alongside the trawlers because of the opportunity to obtain easily available food around the nets. The eating pattern of the pods has changed over the years. In the past, dolphins used to tear nets in order to catch whole fish and caused quite a bit of damage. It now seems that, in the course of time, the dolphins developed a technique of eating fish without tearing the nets.
Mothers teach their calves how to cut the fish away from the net without damaging it.
These findings, as far as we know, are the first of their kind in the world. There's a lot to do in our area. There they have an outdoor pool for recovering beached dolphins, which was donated by Kibbutz Tel Yizhak. In the future, we will set up a laboratory there to perform autopsies on dolphins. The Ministry of the Environment has funded the purchase of a net which will be used to prepare a floating recovery pen, which can be deployed as required, enabling us to care for more beached dolphins.