Video: Here’s what 200 dolphins in a ‘stampede’ looks like

There were so many dolphins, their splashes on the ocean’s surface could be spotted two miles away.

“As soon as we pulled up to the pod of around 200, all the passengers were super excited,” said Mark Girardeau, a photographer aboard a Newport Coastal Adventure charter on Saturday, Sept. 4. “Everyone started moving around on the boats to get better views especially at the front where they were bow riding under the boat.”

For about 30 minutes, the passengers got to hang out with the common dolphins off Newport Beach’s coastline. It wasn’t until the boat was ready to pull away that “the dolphins all of a sudden started launching out of the water like a race just started,” Girardeau said, capturing video of the mega pod in action.

The boat followed alongside as the dolphins stampeded for about five minutes.

It’s not the first time stampeding behavior has been caught on camera off the Orange County coastline. A video taken off Laguna Beach in 2019 made news worldwide and another pod doing the same behavior last year caused a buzz off local waters. Another stamped happened a week ago off Newport Beach’s coast.

Some dolphin stampedes can have thousands of dolphins sprinting across the surface, propelling their bodies out of the water at high speeds. It is not known exactly what causes common dolphins to stampede.

Southern California has the greatest density of dolphins per square mile of anywhere else on Earth, with an estimated 450,000 common dolphins living in local waters.