According to NOAA, bottlenose dolphins are showing signs of severe ill health in Barataria Bay, Louisiana. Preliminary results show that many of the 32 dolphins sampled in a NOAA health assessment in summer, 2011, are underweight, anemic, have low blood sugar and/or some symptoms of liver and lung disease. Nearly half also have abnormally low [...]
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 [...]
Each bottlenose dolphin produces her/his own signature whistle. These whistles appear to communicate the identity, location, and also the emotional state of the dolphin making the whistle. Vocal learning appears to help dolphins develop a novel whistle, and this happens early in life. Signature whistles usually make up about half of the whistles of a [...]
Barks, yelps, thunks, grunts, chirps, and squawks are little-studied and infrequent sounds emitted by different dolphin species. They are called low frequency narrow band (LFN) sounds, and they seem to be associated with socializing, sexual, or aggressive behavior, or possibly foraging activities. LFN sounds have conservation implications because acoustic communication is particularly important in inshore [...]
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