Mark became especially interested in dolphins after an extraordinary experience that started one night on a lonely stretch of desert coastline in the Red Sea. There, he was fortunate enough to spend many hours in the company of a wild dolphin and became fascinated with these incredible creatures.
He has been a diver since he was eighteen when he started as a hobby while with the British military. When he was 23 he left the services to open a diving centre in Paphos, Cyprus.
He lived abroad for eighteen years and during that time travelled to many countries, training scuba instructors, conducting technical diver training and working on diving related projects. These varied from photo-shoots of sharks, running private courses for Arab sheiks, and leading a four-month award-winning expedition to east Africa.
In 1996, he was appointed a vice president with PADI (the Professional Association of Diving Instructors) and moved back to the UK to work in their PADI Europe, Middle East and Africa office in Bristol. In 2015 he moved to a position with PADI Worldwide, but is still based in a village near Bristol. He is also a board member of the major marine charity: Project AWARE.
He has spent a great deal of his life on or in the sea and as a keen photographer has his underwater photographs published many times. In addition to diving frequently, his other main hobby is sailing cruising yachts, and is also a RYA Yachtmaster Ocean.
During his life, he has been fortunate to have had many encounters with dolphins and has had the chance to study them in detail. He is a qualified Marine Mammal Medic with BDMLR.
BBC Interview with Mark Caney
Ocean Geographic Society Presentation
Watch this interview where Mark talks about dolphin society, intelligence, evolution and his book, Dolphin Way.
ADEX interview with Mark Caney 2021
In this interview, Mark talks about his life in the diving industry and, in the last fifteen minutes, explains why he wrote a book set in the world of dolphins.