Dolphins spotted in East River, sparking fascination

An onlooker on Tuesday spotted three dolphins in New York’s East River and posted a video of the trio to Twitter, sparking a flurry of fascination over the aquatic mammals swimming in the city’s once-highly-polluted waters.

The video of the three dolphins in front of a backdrop of New York’s skyscrapers has received more than 1,400 retweets and 7,800 likes.

Howard Rosenbaum, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society Ocean Giants Program and senior scientist at the New York Aquarium, told ABC7 that the sighting is not common.

“We see these animals during our offshore surveys in the wider New York Bight — so this is not normally where they are seen,” Rosenbaum said, adding that it did not appear that the dolphins were in trouble.

“Hopefully this is a group of animals that has been able to freely swim into this area and will freely swim out of the area and are not in distress,” Rosenbaum told ABC7. “However, we don’t know if there are other members of their pod that are in there as well — we just know what this person was fortunate enough to see (and capture/share some nice video).”

The East River previously struggled with severe pollution, but a 2017 report by the New York City Department of Environmental Protection found that the city’s rivers and harbors were the cleanest they had been since the Civil War, The Guardian reported.

Curbed New York reported the city spent $45 billion over the last 40 years to improve water quality, and now, in theory, New Yorkers could even swim in the East River.

Despite the plastic bags and brown muck sometimes spotted in the rocks at riverside, Curbed noted, the middle of the river is deep, clean and constantly moving.

In December, a humpback whale was spotted in Manhattan’s Hudson River, ABC7 reported.