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I took some pictures of dolphins on the way to the Channel Islands and was surprised how many obvious propeller scars they had. Given how much they seemed to love playing all around the boat, I guess it makes sense.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/8913083@N05/5419104265/in/albu...

Many of those scars depict bite marks of other male dolphins fighting for females or females raped. Failed killer whale attacks, deep sea shark bites and cyamid parasite "cities" can be seen also.
Thanks, all this time I thought they were obvious propeller scars.
Are you sure those are propeller scars? They look too shallow and close together. Propeller scars I've seen have looked more like deep cuts more widely spaced out. Propellers are moving with incredible force. I imagine they cause quite a bit of tissue damage upon contact, and it seems unlikely that you'd be able to see such fine detail.

Example of true propeller scars: https://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/wildlife/scars-of-...

This parallel lines in your photos are dolphin teeth's marks @suzzer99. Most are just scratches in the skin.
A similar research is done for humpback whales by HappyWhale: https://happywhale.com/ They're doing a great effort with already over 600K user/tourist submitted photos of whale encounters to track individual whales over the globe
This is great. I've been looking for photos to train a vision detector.

Boats doing hydrographic sounding are required to stay distant from dolphins similar. Currently they need an actual person (persons) to monitor. It would be good to make it easier and less expensive.

Depending on what you need in particular for this project you may be able to find some here: https://universe.roboflow.com/search?q=Dolphin

Btw, if you’re doing this for humanitarian/non-profit purposes we’d be happy to consider sponsoring it!

This DARWIN project for tracking dolphins is old but could be worth taking a look at too.

http://darwin.eckerd.edu/

The scars, scratches and wounds found on dolphin fins are unique enough to identify them.
Or as we call them in the business... Dol-fins
And we in the photography business have a term for a person like the author who takes/collects lots of pics of fins:

a FinFisher aka FinSpy.

Speaking of dolphins, here's some pictures of dolphin I have from waaay back,(these were taken by my father). I unfortunately can't upload them to Unsplash. https://photos.app.goo.gl/5nQt8MNddd4T4PhL7
Now we just need 1k shark fin photos and I can finally build a CNN to power my dream app of Dolphin vs Shark.
Sleepy me was expecting something like "1000 thumbnails photos in Dolphin", and I almost opened Dolphin to start testing... but, whoah! Actual things turned different way :D
I wonder if the structure sociograms like the one at the end of the article could be used as some metric of a species' (social) intelligence
Quick, someone make a dolphin fin LoRA!
How much money was burned on this?
The correct term is 'money invested', not burned. And the payback was huge. This is a catalogue of recognizable individuals and is classical research in aquatic mammals. Used to track migrants all around the world, to calculate how many of an endangered species are still alive, and even to discover several new species of cetaceans in hot spots like California or Australia (new species of bottlenose dolphin). One of the best tools to study cetaceans populations without harassing them, and done routinely since maybe 50 years ago or more. Marine Theriologists had tried to automatize it for decades.

The news here is that has been publicly released. This could mean that the main researcher has quit or retired (maybe to train and pay a human for that job is not needed anymore, maybe the funds dried or the researchers are aging and the team is trying to recruit new volunteers in the so called citizen science or slave's science, dunno).

We should take in mind that many of this photos depict dead dolphins now. I had seen exactly the same fin shapes since 00's if I remember correctly

Does research you disagree with always cause money to be burned instead of spent?