Memory of wildlife-loving mum Ghislaine lives on, thanks to Pronk the dolphin

The memory of a wildlife-loving North East mum will live on in the first North East coastal dolphin to be named after a human friend.

Young male bottlenose Pronk has been named after Ghislaine Pronk, who died in September after a brave cancer battle, at the age of just 54.

Ghislaine was Dutch, and moved to this region with her teenage daughter Sharlene about three years ago, settling in Horden.

With a passion for the sea, wildlife and paddle-boarding, she very quickly became a popular member of the region’s thousands-strong dolphin-spotting fraternity.

Ghislaine spent hours each week with her partner Donald Lang and fellow enthusiasts following dolphins up and down the coast and was often to be found at Roker beach in Sunderland, and on the Durham coast, where one of the dolphins she regularly watched has now been named in her memory.

In the autumn of 2022 Ghislaine, originally from Soest in Holland, was diagnosed with cancer. Her friends rallied round to support her, but despite a courageous and dignified fight against the disease, she died in October at Alice House Hospice in Hartlepool.

She left behind Sharlene, one-year-old granddaughter Chloe, and Donald, also from Horden.

Ghislaine’s friend Jo Richardson runs the ‘citizen scientist-driven’ North East Cetacean Project (NECP), which is producing the first official catalogue of all known dolphins living off the North East coast, which means creating identities for each one – usually in the form of a code

‘Pronk’, who will grow to be about four metres (13ft) long as an adult, had yet to be officially listed in the NECP catalogue when Ghislaine passed away.

Jo said he seems to share Ghislaine’s playful nature, so she thought he would be ideal to carry her name.

"One of the things the dolphins have done is brought people together and created friendships, which is how I came to know and love Ghislaine, and we saw her regularly at Roker," she said.

"She was somebody who everybody was very fond of, and when I heard she’d passed, I wanted to do something as a tribute to her, because the dolphin-spotters like her make huge contributions to the research we’re doing.

"I asked Donald and found that one of his nicknames for Ghislaine was ‘Pronk’, which seemed like a good choice, with Pronk’s nature being like Ghislaine’s and the name itself not being gender-specific.

"So I went with that.”

Pronk and his fellow dolphin members will continue to attract spotters to the beaches, cliffs and piers of the North East – but now Ghislaine’s memory will always accompany them.

A group of Ghislaine’s friends from the Dolphin Spotting North East group, led by group founder Kim Willis, took part in the traditional Boxing Day Dip at Sunderland’s Seaburn beach, to raise money for Alice House Hospice, where Ghislaine was nursed before she died.

Their donations page can be found at: https://alicehousehospice.enthuse.com/pf/dunkin-dolphins