A wild bottlenose dolphin nicknamed Seymour was briefly captured, disentangled from life-threatening fishing line, and released in Southwest Florida on March 9, 2012. SDRP staff member Aaron Barleycorn participated, along with volunteers from a multi-agency team from throughout Florida. SDRP responsibility on the project involved tagging Seymour with a satellite-linked tag to facilitate monitoring his [...]

We only get occasional glimpses of dolphins feeding, but sometimes it’s spectacular. Fish whacking is one of the most noteworthy feeding behaviors. As first documented in the SDRP in the 1980s (and more recently in Time Magazine), a dolphin will “whack” a fish with its tail flukes, sometimes sending the fish 20 ft or more [...]

Bottlenose dolphins often listen for their next meal. While they eat many different fish species, among the favorites in Sarasota Bay are soniferous or noise-making fish, which include pigfish and toadfish. That’s right, dolphins,  which are famous for their sonar, use passive listening to help when hunting prey. Building on ground-breaking work by the late [...]

An oil spill can have both lethal and sub-lethal effects on dolphins. Multiple research efforts are on-going to study the potential impact(s) on dolphins of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which occurred during April – July 2010, . Bottlenose dolphins are the most common cetacean in inshore waters in the southeastern United States, but little [...]

Bottlenose dolphins are threatened by monofilament or braided fishing lines in the water, and by crab trap float lines. In 2011, operating at the request of Federal authorities, staff from the SDRP led or participated in 3 rescue attempts involving entangled dolphins. Most often, a dolphin requiring a rescue is entangled, and its swimming movements [...]

Rescues of entangled dolphins, Deepwater Horizon oil spill-related research, and international conservation capacity building activities were added to our usual behavioral and ecological studies in 2011. You can read about them by downloading a pdf of our annual newsletter Nicks n Notches. It contains articles written by SDRP staff, students, visiting scientists, and current and former [...]

Mirroring the stability of the Sarasota Bay resident dolphin community, most of the staff members of the SDRP have been with the program for at least 8 years. We did see a few changes this year. Operations Specialist Gene Stover retired after many years of dedicated and much-appreciated service as a volunteer and part-time CZS [...]

Living in only 9 deep pools, an estimated 85 critically endangered Irrawaddy dolphins remain in the Mekong River population. Formally, the range of the Irrawaddy dolphin  extended through river, lake, and delta waters extending from Laos through Cambodia into Vietnam. The range is now down to an isolated 190 km section of the Mekong River, [...]