When New Yorkers were graced by the presence of two dolphins in the city’s East River earlier this month, marine experts said such a sighting was rare – but also a sign that this spring and summer season could be a good one for spotting more marine mammals, both great and small.
On the morning of 14 February, a pair of common short-beaked dolphins was spotted alongside Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Experts tracking them observed that they lingered until 17 February, swimming up and down the fast-flowing channel that divides Manhattan from the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn and is lined with skyscrapers.
“We received a few reports that morning that people driving along the Franklin D Roosevelt East River Drive saw dolphins jumping in the water,” Chris St Lawrence, a researcher and spokesperson for Gotham Whale, a local marine tracking and research organization, said, referring to the busy Manhattan highway that runs along the shoreline.
“We take these things with a grain of salt, especially when there aren’t any photos, so I went out there and I was able to see this pair of dolphins and they spent the entire day right there,” he added.
According to St Lawrence, common short-beaked dolphins are not a species that residents would typically see in New York City’s inner waterways. “This is a species that we see here in New York year round but they are usually found further offshore … so it is super exciting to have them this accessible for people to see.”
The two were probably pursuing dinner.
Maxine Montello, executive director of New York Marine Rescue Center, said: “There’s definitely some fish resources in there … The two that were spotted were noted to be playing and potentially foraging … They’re definitely eating smaller schooling fish in that area.”
Describing the physical differences between common short-beaked dolphins and bottlenose dolphins, which are more typically spotted from local beaches, St Lawrence said the most visible marker of the former species was the yellowish hourglass marking along their sides.
“It’s super, super distinct. Bottlenose are all gray with a whitish belly but these common dolphins have a yellow flash on their side. And common dolphins are quite playful so when they jump out of the water, you can see that yellow pretty clearly,” he said.
As reports of the dolphin duo emerged over the weekend, St Lawrence said the biggest reaction Gotham Whale received was concern from people who wondered whether the dolphins were OK.
“We’ve seen dolphins and other marine life end up in some of these polluted canals and then end up dying and people were worried about that happening with these animals right in the East River,” St Lawrence explained, adding: “But experts have shown that the East River is the cleanest now than it’s been in a century.”
Pointing to the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the 1972 Clean Water Act, which regulates discharges of pollutants into waters across the US, St Lawrence said: “These environmental regulations have cleaned up our city’s waterways, enabling things like fish to marine mammals to come into these waters and survive.”
Dolphins are not the only unusual marine visitors.
Last November, a humpback whale made an appearance in the East River underneath the Brooklyn Bridge, reflecting the growing number of whale sightings that have been made across the city in recent years.
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When Gotham Whales first started documenting sightings in 2011, marine experts were only able to document five whales that year. However, in 2024, experts identified approximately 160 individual whales in the New York City area, St Lawrence said.
“Last season was record-setting for our humpbacks so it’s looking pretty good for this coming year,” St Lawrence said.
Montello said: “These are all kind of positive signs of potentially how our water is allowing these animals to kind of go into areas that maybe were less ideal many moons ago.”
In addition to the Clean Water Act, Montello pointed to the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which affords federal protections to marine mammals by prohibiting hunting, capturing and harassing them.
To Montello, the combination is “really furthering the protection of both resources and animal populations, to increase these populations and protect these populations so that we do see them on a bigger basis”.
There was a climate element, too, Montello said. “In the positive realm, we know climate change and increased warmer waters could potentially expand animals’ territory, so that would indicate animals that we don’t normally see coming to our waters,” she said. On the downside, she added, there could also be “an increase of virus-spreading and other elements of those calibers because maybe more animals are overlapping [territorially] that didn’t originally, due to these kind of climate change-related effects.”
Nevertheless, dolphins and whales are still threatened by local plastic pollution.
“Plastic and digestion is an issue for marine mammals in our area,” St Lawrence said, adding that local residents should mind their trash and support local government cleanup efforts.
“What we’re trying to share with people is that city and wildlife can go together and … make that connection between the city and our ocean. New York is a series of islands in the Atlantic and people don’t know that,” St Lawrence said, adding: “Our mission … is to make people realize that not only are we an ocean city, we are near an ocean that’s very much alive.”
