July 19, 2016 — A waterfront house on Virginia’s Northern Neck promised to be a getaway for Janet Mann from three decades of studying dolphins, primarily in Australia’s Shark Bay.
But the day after Mann and her husband closed on the place in Ophelia, VA, four years ago, she spied an all-too-familiar sight from the shore where the Potomac River joins the Chesapeake Bay.
“I said, ‘Oh, look, dolphins!’ And then I thought, ‘Oh, no,’” Mann recalled. “I think we’ve given up on getting me away from my work.”
A professor of biology and psychology at Georgetown University in the District of Columbia, Mann has since embraced the Potomac as the next frontier for her research. In fact, she’s turned that riverfront retreat into a field station for observing a surprising number of bottlenose dolphins that venture up the Bay’s second largest tributary every summer.
Though dolphins have been spotted occasionally in the Potomac for at least the last six years, Mann said she hasn’t met anyone outside of those who live near her summer house who realize how many of the marine mammals are visiting on a regular basis. Last year, she and her research team of students and other Georgetown faculty tallied nearly 200 different animals in just a two-week span.