TALK OF THE BAY

Janet Mann had been studying dolphins in Australia’s Shark Bay for several decades when her husband suggested buying a cottage off the Potomac River in Virginia’s Northern Neck several years back as a dolphin-free retreat. “I resisted it,” Mann explains with a chuckle. “It was my husband’s idea. He thought I worked too much and wanted a getaway place for us. Literally the day we close on the house, there are dolphins in our backyard.”

- Ron Cassie

A professor of biology and psychology at Georgetown University, Mann thought the dolphin sighting was an anomaly. No scientific literature on the mammals in the Chesapeake Bay existed, let alone in the Potomac River. But so many kept popping their bottlenoses up behind Mann’s “escape” cottage, she soon turned it into a field station. “My husband is a patient man.”

Following a dolphin die-off in the Bay caused by a virus outbreak, Mann and her research team launched the first-ever formal study of the local population in 2015. That effort grew into the Potomac-Chesapeake Dolphin Project, which today surveys the social and super-smart mammals from May through October in about 14 square miles of the Potomac. They’ve documented dolphins up river as far as the Harry W. Nice Bridge in Charles County, about 75 miles south of Baltimore. (The distressed dolphin that died in the Inner Harbor last year was a peculiar incident; normally they come no closer than the mouth of the Patapsco.)