Dolphins, California and a cetologist

Maddalena Bearzi, former collaborator of Tethys, and a friend, has just published a new book about her experience as a researcher with dolphins.


ITA Maddalena Bearzi, già collaboratrice, e amica, di Tethys, che vive e lavora negli Stati Uniti, ha pubblicato un nuovo libro sulla sua esperienza di lavoro con i delfini - per ora in inglese.

Dolphin Confidential: Confessions of a Field Biologist is a popular, passionate, sometimes intimate narrative of over half-a-lifetime spent in the company of wild dolphins. In-depth narrations of Maddalena Bearzi’s field work with dolphins present, not only a look into marine mammal social behavior and intelligence, but offer the reader a window into her personal thoughts and sensations as well as the insecurities and frustrations unfolded during her encounters with cetaceans and other animal creatures.

         Told in a style evocative of a diary, the book carries the reader through the author’s life, as she struggles to find her own way in the world and her own balance. It chronicles the transformative process from wide-eyed naiveté to the unwavering belief that conservation and protection of nature is now virtually all that matters. Dolphin Confidential offers an honest and down-to-earth analysis of what it means to be a field marine biologist (or better still a cetologist), in a modern world wrought with environmental degradation.

         The central part of the book is devoted to the metropolitan bottlenose dolphins of California, to which the author owes most of her knowledge of dolphins. Here, it offers insight into the daily lives of these creatures as well as the difficulties involved collecting the data that allows hunches to become tested hypotheses, then scientific facts. In the latter part of the book, as the author shapes into a full-fledged scientist, the narration unavoidably slips into the critical problems facing these magnificent, socially complex, large-brained and emotional beings.

Dolphin Confidential is a confessional journey into a human mind as much as it is a journey into the vastness and magnificence of nature.

"Dolphin Confidential" is available on Amazon both printed and as an  e-book.