Back on a boat – and with dolphins. This time with bottlenose and Heaviside’s dolphins, in the cold plankton and jellyfish soup that is the Benguela current. Walvis Bay has a large industrial port, which means dolphins often zigzag between ships and oil platforms. And we, too, alongside of them.

The office is filled with cetacean bones. Our front yard is filled with boxes of bones. Killer whale and bottlenose dolphin skulls, minke whale vertebrae, a Ryde’s whale jawbone, and huge, hairy, bone brush baleens.

Inside hangs a poster with dolphin and whale species, many named after scientists: Heaviside’s dolphin, Peale’s dolphin, Bryde’s whale (pronounced here as “brutus whale”, even if Bryde was a Norwegian). Perhaps it was a custom to give famous naturalists a marine mammal species named after them upon retirement. If not dolphin or whale then a seal. Or a penguin. (Walvis Bay, Namibia; June 2017)