Again in 2011, for a second year, the story continues to be calves, calves and more calves. We have followed up last summer’s 17 new babies with a very respectable eight newborns in 2011. It has been a decade since so many calves have been born into the population over only two years. 2011 moms [...]

Coastal estuaries such as Sarasota Bay are reservoirs of biological diversity; however, out of the thousands of species that inhabit Sarasota Bay, bottlenose dolphins are of special ecological importance for at least two reasons. They are large predators near the top of their food web and they are long-lived. Top predators are useful indicators of [...]

Predation constitutes a suite of behavioral, individual, and population effects and plays a critical role in population regulation. One important effect is the influence that predatory pressures exact upon the abundance and distribution of prey species. Conversely, individual predators such as bottlenose dolphins can be affected by changes in prey density by consuming more of [...]

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 [...]

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill and several Unusual Mortality Events (UMEs) in the Gulf of Mexico have shown that knowledge of bottlenose dolphins in much of the Gulf is insufficient to meet the mandates of the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act. In much of the Gulf, stock boundaries have been assigned arbitrarily based on geography [...]

In the past two decades, we have observed that harmful algal blooms, or red tides, of the toxic algal species Karenia brevis appear to have varying effects on bottlenose dolphin populations. Red tides have been associated with several large-scale mortality events of dolphins in the Florida Panhandle, whereas dolphin populations in central-west Florida, including Sarasota [...]

The objective of the study was to develop and compare information on diet from stomach content analysis of stranded specimens of two dolphin species that are known to use offshore habitats. Data were available from eight Risso’s dolphins and 17 offshore bottlenose dolphins, stranded along the Gulf of Mexico, on the east coast of Florida [...]

January, 2012 In Sarasota Bay, the occurrence of a severe red tide in 2005 was followed by increases in dolphin depredation behaviors, declines in body condition, decreased abundance (through temporary and permanent movements to neighboring waters or disappearances), and increased mortality of weaning and newly independent calves. These changes in the dolphin population correlated with [...]