A documentary about research by a Georgetown professor, which premiered on campus two months ago, is making its debut on Animal Planet this Sunday. Professor Janet Mann, of the psychology and biology departments, studies dolphins on the west coast of Australia when not at Georgetown.

The documentary, “The Dolphins of Shark Bay” follows the family of 33-year-old female Puck and her struggle to keep her family safe.

In her own words, the documentary presents Mann’s research “pretty accurately,” including a “groundbreaking” segment on the dolphin practice of hydroplaning.

Love dolphins? Check it out on Sunday at 7:00 p.m.

“The Dolphins of Shark Bay” had its American Premiere at Georgetown last night.

A packed room greeted the United States premiere of BBC documentary “The Dolphins of Shark Bay” in White-Gravenor.  The documentary features Professor Janet Mann, who splits her time between teaching in the Georgetown biology and psychology departments and studying dolphins at an isolated research center on the West Coast of Australia.  In Shark Bay, which is an UNESCO World Heritage site, Mann and her team study around 1600 dolphins. Read the rest of this entry »

Great news for aquatic mammal aficionados! Georgetown scientists have pioneered a non-invasive way to collect dolphin DNA through the animals’ blow.

What is blow, you ask? Just the dolphins’ exhalations. (Get your mind out of the gutter, creep.)

After training six bottlenose dolphins at the National Aquarium in Baltimore to exhale on command, Professor Janet Mann, Ewa Krzyszczyk (G ’13), and Eric Patterson (G ’13) collected DNA samples by holding test tubes over the animals’ blowholes. The group later published an article titled “Thar She Blows!” in the scientific journal PLoS ONE, which argues that the blow sampling method works just as well as traditional blood sampling.

Mann now plans to bring the method Australia’s Shark Bay, where she hopes to study a wild population of bottlenose dolphins.

As for us, we’ll be over here chuckling to ourselves about the terminology.

Heh. “Blow.”

Photo: Blue & Gray