Wildlife watchers have been praised for helping scientists accurately explore which individual bottlenose dolphins are now found along the Yorkshire coastline.
The animals, which belong to a population known to the east coast of Scotland, are now regularly spotted as far south as Scarborough, Whitby and Bridlington.
Researchers said photographs sent to them by members of the public have been used to identify individual dolphins by the notches and other marks on their dorsal fins.
Grant Ellis, from the Sea Mammal Research Unit based at the University of St Andrews, said the Citizen Fins project had received more than 5,000 photographs from dolphin spotters in five years.
In July a pod of more than 200 bottlenose dolphins, thought to have made its way from the Moray Firth in Scotland, was seen frolicking and feeding in the North Sea off Scarborough.
A group of hundreds of bottlenose dolphins captivated wildlife watchers in Scarborough in July [Stuart Baines]
Mr Ellis said: “It seems that they’re being seen quite a lot in Yorkshire, so we’re really interested to know which animals they were and to understand more about their movements between England and Scotland.
“We set up this project called Citizen Fins, where people could send us their photos, and then we would match them to our catalogue of known individuals.
“From that we’ve been able to match more than 70 individual dolphins to the catalogue. Some animals have even been documented moving between the Moray Firth and Yorkshire.
“We’ve had more than 400 submissions and more than 5,000 photos, since 2020.”
Mr Ellis said the evidence sent from Yorkshire had been “a massive boon to scientists”.
“This project has given us the evidence that there are definitely Scottish animals in England, and that’s making us rethink how we monitor the whole population,” he said.
Stuart Baines said dolphins sightings off Scarborough have increased from “once a year, to once a day” [Stuart Baines]
One regular contributor to the Citizen Fins project is Stuart Baines.
Mr Baines, 66, from Scarborough, is the local Sea Watch Foundation representative – a charity that monitors whales, dolphins, and porpoises – and set up the Scarborough Porpoise Facebook page.
“I have been recording them in the Yorkshire area for about 15 years and then about 10 years ago I thought I’ll set up this Facebook page and see if anyone might be interested in seeing what’s in the area,” he said.
“And that’s blossomed considerably and got to more than 120,000 followers.”
Mr Baines said he started noticing regular dolphin activity on his morning commute to work as a solicitor.
“At the time I worked for a firm of solicitors in Scarborough and every morning on my way to work I would drive around Marine Drive and then come back that way in the evening and jot down what I saw.
“And then I retired four years ago and since then, I’m becoming more involved. And I’m down down there far too much.”
Researchers want photographs of bottlenose dolphins sent to the Citizen Fins website [Stuart Baines]
Mr Baines said his recordings definitely show a “significant increase” in bottlenose dolphin activity in the area.
“The picture has changed enormously in the last five or six years,” he said.
“For the first 10 years of my recording cetaceans off Yorkshire, we’d get lots of harbour porpoise and minke whales and perhaps five or six bottlenose dolphin sightings.
“Before that, If I saw them once in a year I was excited.
“But from a baseline of four or five sightings in a year, it’s gone to over 700 sightings – it’s just gone up and up.
“It’s unusual nowadays not to see dolphins off Scarborough at some point during the day, whereas before that just didn’t happen.”
The images are used to identify individual dolphins by the notches and other marks on their dorsal fins [Stuart Baines]
Speaking about the Citizen Fins project he said: “It’s brilliant. It enables them to provide evidence that these animals are not only off Scotland and in northern England and Northumberland, but also off Yorkshire now.
“So the more photographs that people can submit of fins, that’s great, because about 50% of the bottlenose dolphins have identifiable fins one from another.
“Because they’re quite boisterous animals, they tend to grab each other’s fins or scrape the side, and then they keep that mark for life.”
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