In response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, a Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) was performed on the St. Joseph Bay bottlenose dolphin community. The overall goals of the NRDA process, which is part of NOAA’s Damage Assessment, Remediation, and Restoration Program (DARRP), are to: 1) Identify the extent of resources that were damaged 2) [...]

Much concern surrounded the potential catastrophic impacts of the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill on wildlife and habitats in the Gulf of Mexico. The most common cetaceans in inshore waters of the Gulf, bottlenose dolphins, reside in coastal waters and bays, sounds, and estuaries where exposure to oil from the DWH incident was [...]

By Graham A.J. Worthy, PhD (UCF), Steve Shippee (UCF), Randall S. Wells, PhD (CZS/Mote Marine Laboratory), Martin Shannon (FFWRI), and Peggy Ostrom, PhD (MSU) We have assembled a collaborative team of researchers from the University of Central Florida, the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program, and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute to study the potential [...]

By Brian Balmer, MS, PhD Student, Chicago Zoological Society and University of North Carolina Wilmington In response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, we were contracted to perform a Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) on the St. Joseph Bay bottlenose dolphin community. The overall goals of the NRDA process, which is part of NOAA’s Damage [...]

By Randall S. Wells, PhD By mid-May 2010, it was believed by many that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was destined to be a major environmental catastrophe for the Gulf of Mexico. Communities all around the Gulf and beyond were bracing for the potential arrival of oil. Because of the Loop Current, a major current [...]

To date, DNA panels for 238 dolphins of the Sarasota Bay community indicate that 51 calves were sired by a male in the community; 20 calves (28%) were not.

Beginning in the mid-1990s there has been an unprecedented increase in the numbers of dolphins using Sarasota Bay, from a 20-year average of about 100-120 dolphins to more than 175 dolphins in the early 2000’s. Some of this increase was a result of recruitment through successful reproduction of long-term residents, but many of the animals [...]

For my dissertation, I am working with NOAA to compare bottlenose dolphin populations near EPA superfund sites in Georgia to those at a nearby national estuarine reserve. The Turtle/Brunswick River Estuary (TBRE) located in Glynn County, Georgia, includes the Turtle and Brunswick Rivers, St. Simons Sound, St. Simons Island, and Jekyll Island. The LCP Chemical [...]