West Florida Shelf bottlenose dolphins: Population structure, health, and oil spill impacts
In contrast to the decades of information available from bottlenose dolphins inhabiting some of southwest Florida’s bays, sounds, and estuaries, little is known about the health, stock structure, ranging patterns, and dive behavior of bottlenose dolphins in West Florida Shelf waters, 10-30 miles offshore.
Information is needed to define population units for management purposes; data on ranging patterns, genetics, and contaminant profiles can help to refine stock identification. Dolphins living in these offshore waters may have been impacted by oil from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill.
It is important that baseline information be collected on shelf dolphins to allow for future evaluation of changes that may be associated with long-term impacts from the spill.
With support from the Georgia Aquarium, Dolphin Quest, and Dolphin Connection, we will perform standard health assessments and sample collection for 6 bottlenose dolphins over the shelf, and we will tag them with satellite-linked transmitters that will provide data on movements and dive patterns for up to several months post-release. Remote tracking of the dolphins via satellite will allow evaluation of their movements, dive depths, duration of dives, and time spent at depth.
Dolphins riding at the bow of Mote Marine Laboratory’s R/V Eugenie Clark will be captured via standard hoop-net technique, brought aboard the Clark for a brief health assessment and tagging by an experienced team of researchers and veterinarians, and then released immediately onsite.
Sample collection will follow established NOAA protocols to facilitate comparisons with samples collected elsewhere in the Gulf of Mexico in association with oil spill research. Efforts to initiate this research in late October were thwarted by persistent high winds and rough seas; the project has been rescheduled for spring 2012.
